Sex and the City 2, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristen Davis and Cynthia Nixon premiered to millions Thursday, May 27, promising glamour, couture, and all-around fabulousness.
The movie, however, did not live up to its expectations. The four women, after six seasons and a movie all about love found, lost and made seem to have lost their spark as New York City’s “ultimate single gals.”
The second installment of the Sex franchise changed locations from Manhattan to Abu Dhabi, where the famous four lived in the lap of luxury in efforts to relax from their stressful and chaotic lives of family, husbands and jobs. Decked out in vintage designers and always with a cosmo in hand, the ladies whined about their humdrum lives and fought menopause.
Hardly the fabulous escapism one seeks in a Sex and the City show or movie.
The movie’s plot was uneventful and questionably existent. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, the movie’s one-sided main characters, merely discussed their problems, cried and discussed some more while looking fabulous and riding camels.
What the movie producers didn’t seem to realize was that a Middle Eastern background and shiny jewels do not make a movie happen. It actually takes a screenplay to break the box office.
Though it would be a lie to say the movie was entirely awful. There was some humor mixed into the monotonous drama, such as the gay wedding in the opening of the movie, shortly followed by a rendition of Beyonce’s Single Ladies performed by Liza Minnelli. The jokes were few and far between, but the miniscule amount that the movie had always aroused a chuckle or two from the theater.
In all honesty, America should have seen it coming; nothing that the movie’s writers could have conjured up would have topped the first film, or for that matter, the TV show from which they originated. Parker has said the reason the TV show ended was because they wanted to stop while SATC were at their highest instead of plummeting to a violent television death, and I would advise the same caution with the making of consequent SATC movies.
