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What to do, what to do. You've made a mint, a fortune. An incomprehensible pile of dough from your HBO TV show and syndication and DVD sales and the film version which made half a billion dollars and you know, you know in your bones because your product is good, that there is more money sitting there, waiting to be made.
Your fans still love you, and haven't been won away to other shows: your brand is sacred and almost uncontested in its niche. But... well, it's getting to be a stretch. Sexy single women in their 30's struggling to make it in the big city have become married mothers in their 40's with fortunes of their own, fortunes that seem a little tacky maybe in these days of conspicuous economy and restraint.
What you should do is say, "We had our run".
What you definitely shouldn't do is make your coda a two-and-a-half-hour long slapstick romp about rich, dull women that look like ropy hunks of lacquered wood with jewels glued to them having a very expensive vacation in Abu Dhabi. Despite the impulse.
Catching up with the girls two years down the road from the first film, Sex and the City 2 catches Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) as she struggles with the boring realities of her marriage to Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and spends her time decorating their new apartment "12 floors down" from their previous penthouse. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is barely hanging on, dealing with her daughter's terrible twos and the fear that her husband may have a thing for their fetching Irish nanny (Alice Eve). Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is chafing in her lawyer job, trapped under the glass ceiling while P.R. agent Samantha (Kim Cattrall) struggles with the onset of menopause. Getting the girls together out at the premiere of a film, Samantha is asked by a Sheik to visit his hotel in Abu Dhabi to design for him a P.R. campaign, and she whisks her three friends off to the U.A.E. for a fabulous, each-to-her-own-stretch-Maybach-limo vacation. Some drinks, some shopping, some dishing, a couple of romantic crises that arrive apropos of nothing and fizzle away into meaninglessness almost immediately.
The film also suffers from its mightily weird choice to have the four sexually open imbibers spend their last hour of screen-time among the burqa-ed ladies of Abu Dhabi. That hour is spent pin-balling violently from hilariously simple cultural dismissiveness - the ladies' response to Carrie's observation that veils make it seem like Muslim men "don't want women to have a voice" is to go to a nightclub and sing "I am Woman" to rapturous applause - to facile commentary on the real dirty pool being played in that part of the world - slave labour building 7-star hotels - to borderline offensive exoticism to openly rude flaunting of the cultural mores of the city they've decided to visit. It's uproariously moronic. Samantha, shrieking and haggard and shaking under the stress of her aging vagina, throws handfuls of condoms at men in the Soukh, and then panics when they get mad and shouty, you know, as those Muslims do. Thankfully, the ladies are whisked away into safety by robed women, who doff their robes to reveal, for some reason the spring '10 Versace line. This is supposed, I assume, to mean something.
It's not just pointless, it's also enthusiastically rude: a whole-hearted celebration of the clueless, rich American abroad. Furthermore - and most tragically - it's decidedly not Manhattan, the locale that transcended setting to become a living, breathing character itself in the original series.
Almost all of what made the original TV show so great - its verve, its spark, its keenness of observation and snappiness and willingness to be up-front and unapologetically adult and funny and sexy - is gone. What remains is limp. It's shiny, to be sure, and there are a few short scenes of the girls sitting around the pool trading quips and bawdy barbs, but they're a melancholy pleasure buried under hours of pointless, boring agonizing over the really minor minutiae of grown-up life. A loud baby, a braless nanny, a TV in the bedroom, a mean boss: this is hardly sexy, provocative stuff, and outfits and jewelry and shoes alone can't keep this massive, gaudy thing afloat. 3.5/10
score 3/10
thesubstream 5 June 2010
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2259842/ |
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29-11-2019 11:45:14
