Sex and the City 2 an Excessive Nightmare
Sex and the City is one of those efforts that tends to get worse for me the longer it sits in my memory which is a tiny bit unfair. As much as the things that annoyed me about it drive me nuts (the length, the rampant materialism, the cloying silliness of just about anything having to do with Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, the way Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw is an annoying whiner with bad fashion sense) the things that work (Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda Hobbes dealing with marital infidelity, Kristin Davis’ Charlotte York struggles with parenthood, the way the central relationship between the four women feel honest and truthful) deserve far more in the way of kudos than I’m usually prepared to give them. While not a great movie it does have its remarkable moments, and as such I should probably be nicer to it than I usually am.
Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon in Sex and the City 2 © New Line Cinemas
Sex and the City 2 should have no worries that I’ll waffle in my future opinions about it. Put simply, I couldn’t stand this monstrous claptrap of a motion picture, its frivolousness and obnoxiously noxious bad taste leaving me more or less stunned by just how horrific it actually was.
Picking up two years after the previous film, this one finds our four fabulous New York women stuck in various states of rut. Carrie is worried her marriage to Big (Chris Noth) is losing its sparkle, Miranda is unhappy at work thanks to a sexist new boss, Charlotte is feeling like a bad mother because there are moments when she can’t stand being around her own two children and Samantha is hopped up on estrogens desperately trying to stave off menopause. They’ve all got issues, so when an Abu Dhabi sheik invites them to stay in his lavish hotel for a Middle Eastern holiday the women come to the quick conclusion this will be the perfect opportunity for all of them to put their worries on hold.
I’m not sure where to begin. First off, writer/director Michael Patrick King has all but excised every trace of what originally made his HBO series (itself based on characters found in Candace Bushnell’s book) oftentimes great. These aren’t women anymore, their histrionic caricatures of women acting like spoiled brats. Their relationships with one another should be the movie’s heart and soul but instead I just didn’t care, none of them talking about a single item of import or interest. For a program that used to love and cherish women this sequel borderline hates them, and save for scant few moments here and there I found very little in this picture that didn’t infuriate me.
Like the first film, length is also a problem. Pushing 150 minutes, King’s script takes forever to get anywhere, the actual central narrative not kicking in until around the one-third mark. The opening wedding of Anthony Marantino (Mario Cantone) and Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) is a garishly overblown spectacle complete with Liza Minnelli singing “Single Ladies.” But it is also pointless, adding little to nothing to the plot. Worse, it’s borderline offensive, the stereotypes it trots out with unabashed pride so vulgar I can’t help but wonder what the director was thinking when he wrote them into the script.
I will say that both Nixon and especially Davis try to make the best of things. The two share a single scene together that, while silly on the surface, ends up being the only emotionally honest moment in the entire motion picture. Commiserating over cosmos, the two best friends begin to put recent troubles and worries into perspective, this brief, blissful bit giving an insight into the characters that’s positively sublime and recalls even more wondrous and similar moments from the television series.
I also like the fact that, for maybe the first time that I can recall, Carrie fesses up to a mistake almost as quickly as she makes it. Not to go into it in too much detail but a chance encounter has unexpected consequences, and for this more often than not narcissistic and selfish woman to own up to her own shortcomings, especially to the man she purports to love, is a thing that caught me by total surprise.
But none of it is enough. The rampant excesses are downright appalling, and the way the four women treat their Middle Eastern hosts, especially Samantha, is nearly unforgivable. While I appreciate her raw sexuality, and I agree that she has every right to flaunt it how she chooses, both as a character and as a successful business woman I do not believe she would be quite as uncouth as she is. Not only is it rude, it also destroys business opportunities, and while I love the fact Samantha has always been both open and honest about who she is that doesn’t make anything that she does in Abu Dhabi even close to appropriate.
The bottom line is that nothing of interest happens in this movie. It is a catalog of bad fashions (if awesome footwear), odder hairstyles (Carrie’s wedding do is particularly horrendous) and even worse stereotypes (particularly that aforementioned wedding). The movie turns its heroines into oddly unappealing jokes, stripping away their humanity leaving the lot of them as shells of the former feminine selves. In short, I detested Sex and the City 2, and as a former fan of the show this is one writer who’s ready to close the book on this particular series for good.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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