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Sex and the City 2 – Carrie on follow that camel

28th May 2010 By Tim Isaac

Sex and the City is the entertainment equivalent of McDonalds. It’s bad for you, has no flavour, celebrates rampart capitalism and commercialism (while pretending it has a heart), and is fronted by a hideous looking creation wearing too much make-up. However no matter how much you know you should avoid it, most of the time when you’re actually consuming it, you can’t help but enjoy the guilty pleasure. Other times, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I liked the first Sex and the City movie far more than I thought I would. Sure it was crass, dumb and it was like watching Madame Tussauds waxworks pretending to be real people, but it skipped along nicely, Sarah Jessica Parker was less annoying than usual and by the end I was just about satisfied. I was kind of hoping the second one would be the same, and while I feel avid fans of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda will just be happy to see them back again, everyone else is likely to wonder what kind of idiots the filmmakers take us for. Well, after the first film grossed over $400 million worldwide, you can sort of understand why they might think we’re all total idiots who will take anything they can serve up, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have put in more of an effort.

While the first film just about worked by concluding stories that had run through the TV series, the sequel comes up against the almost inevitable problem that in the 12 years since we first met Carrie and co., the characters have never been more than skin deep, and seeing as even that skin is covered in enough make-up, creams, tonics, salves and anything else the cosmetics industry can come up with, they’re not really the most fascinating bunch without a strong script. Although some insist they are great characters, each can be summed up in about 10 words, and they haven’t deviated from that for a dozen years.

With the TV series it almost hypnotised you by having the characters getting into never-ending cycles where nothing ever changed but it always looked like it did. But it’s more difficult to do that in a film, especially when you’ve supposedly tied so many things up with the first movie.

The solution? To do what every other franchise has done when it can’t think where to go next – send the characters on holiday. Set two years after the first film, Carrie is already tiring of happy ever after, and has started to get annoyed by Mr. Big’s existence. The other girls also have their problems – as always of the ‘I wish was rich enough to have that predicament’ variety – such as Miranda worrying because her nanny (Alice Eve) doesn’t wear a bra (well, she’s worried about raising the kids and whether the nanny will steal her husband, but the bra-lessness  seems to be important too), Samantha is still man-eating but getting paranoid that the menopause won’t allow her to bounce on as many penises as before, while Miranda decides to stop being a lawyer so she can be with her family.

In order to cheer themselves up from their middle-class pseudo-problems, they all head off on holiday to the middle-east. At this point, the makers seem to have watched Carry On Follow That Camel and the American Dad double-episode, ‘Stan In Arabia’, and taken that as their cultural references for life in a Muslim country.

Wouldn’t you know it, but Carrie and friends have no clue about the social mores of women in an Islamic land, and proceed to flounce around, occasionally making comments that it doesn’t seem fair the women seem so oppressed (it probably wouldn’t be a problem for them if Chanel did a line in burkhas), while meeting a succession of men who seem to have wandered off the set of Prince Of Persia and ended up in the wrong movie. However don’t fret, because eventually Carrie and her cronies come to learn that no matter how different things seem on the outside, inside all women are shallow, fashion-obsessed harridans, whose problems are superficial and rather tedious.

If you’re wondering why I liked the first film but I’m ripping into Sex and the City 2 while basically saying it’s got all the same problems as its predecessor (except with much more middle-eastern stereotyping), I can understand why you’d be confused. However the problem this time around is that it’s all so smug. It’s the sensation that everyone is incredibly self-satisfied without having any reason to be, and that they feel that they don’t need to put in any effort to make the film a success. Instead they just chuck any old thing on the screen, mug for the camera and lazily yawn out a few jokes, thinking people will be happy because it’s Sex and the City and the women are wearing daft clothes (of course this time the fashion has to have a bit of an Arabian Nights theme).

While the film faintly stabs at the idea that the women are thinking about the fact they’re older than they were when they first started talking about sex in a coffee shop in 1998, there’s no sensation they’ve really grown, changed or even have a conception that the problems of their over-privileged lives are largely of their own making, and that things aren’t that bad anyway. While you can get away with a TV series about a group of women in their 30s with that lack of self-awareness, because it seems to be about them learning and trying to find their way in the world (even if they don’t learn that much), by the time they reach their mid-40s, you just start to wonder how they actually manage to function in life. Quite frankly they need to get over themselves, as it’s becoming tiresome and strained. A little more imagination and humour in the script might have been able to cover the problems up, but instead they’re there for all the world to see.

It doesn’t help either that at 146 minutes it is far longer than it ought to be. Someone really needed to cut the fat, but instead it’s allowed to meander long past when even charitable people will think it should have ended.

The whole of the Sex and the City franchise is a fantasy dressed up in the Blahniks of a look at modern women trying to have it all, but it’s a fantasy that’s getting hard to pull off, especially when it’s presented in such a blatant, ‘we’re only here because we’ve been paid a shit-load of money’ way. Several people have said that in Sex and the City 2, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte have become caricatures of themselves, but the truth is they were always caricatures, which is fine when they’ve got something interesting to do, but when they don’t, it’s more difficult not to notice that the emperor has no clothes (not even designer label ones).

Overall Verdict: While some of their earlier adventures were fun, when neither the actors nor writers care, it’s all a vacuous, pointless parody of modern womanhood – but this time with vaguely offensive middle-eastern stereotypes thrown in.

Reviewer: Phil Caine

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