Strange bedfellows

Is it a bad time for a quickie?

Sigh, first a review of The Little Mermaid for the NES and now this: Sex and the City 2.  In fairness, I feel like at least this is doing a service to any men out there dating or married to a 20-something woman who dragged them to the theater on the pretense of a little togetherness time.  Ah, the sacrifices we make for those we love.

I understand that I'm getting to this review rather late in the film's life-cycle.  Sex only came out Japan a couple weeks ago and if the theater my wife and I went to was any indication, plenty of women are still interested in it.  I refer, of course, to the movie Sex and not the act of sex.  The latter, of course, came out here a couple decades ago and has long since gone out of style.

I also acknowledge that I'm not Sex and the City 2's target audience, but I also know that, being a chick-flicky date movie, there are still going to be enough men in the audience to still make an impact on box office receipts.  But my verdict: definitely not worth the price of admission.

As I just mentioned, I'm not the target audience.  I've seen maybe five episodes of the TV series and the first movie with my wife.  Generally speaking though, I enjoyed them.  Although the show was definitively for women and about women, I pride myself on at least being able to recognize good writing, and, despite my extremely limited exposure to the show, it's fairly clear that "good writing" is one thing it definitely had in spades.  And that's one thing I've always been able to get into about Sex, even if the characters and situations are as inaccessible to me as my abusive, alcoholic step-father.  Every episode I watched kept me entertained throughout. The writing was always clever and punchy and I often found myself genuinely enjoying and engaged with the plot, even if I had little to no idea who these people actually were.

Walking into the theater yesterday, I can honestly say I knew the names of about three characters and a tenuous-at-best grasp on the relationships between the lot of them.  The good news is, that doesn't really matter.  Sex and the City 2 does a good job of trying to bridge the knowledge gap of an audience seeing all these people for the first time, and this is something I was actually wondering if they would bother trying to re-introduce characters that have populated the mainstream media for 12 years now.  So dudes, chicks, dudes who like stuff made for chicks, you won't be at a loss for understanding who these people are and the relevant backgrounds between them if you aren't familiar with the TV series.

Bad news is, that's about all the good news I have.

First off: the plot.  There isn't one.

If you've seen a trailer or even a poster promoting Sex 2, you know that the main vehicle for the plot is that the four main characters are going to the Middle East.  From what I've seen of the show, it seems like it's a character-driven series.  The action of the show isn't nearly as central to the development of the story as the characters themselves.  Their relationships, struggles, and changes ultimately lead to the resolution of the plot de jour, for better or worse.  So the decision to make the driving force of the action based around a set and a situation rather than the characters they expect the audience to be attached to struck me as a very questionable one.

The inciting incident occurs when Samantha's (Kim Cattrall) old flame calls her up from the Middle East, having just finished shooting a movie there.  He's on his way back to the States for the red carpet ceremony and invites Samantha--his former publicist to whom he owes his career and success--to join him.  There, Samantha meets the film's producer, a rich Arab sheik, who wants to use Samantha's talents to promote the United Arab Emirates... for some reason.  I didn't really get why he suddenly became the PR guy for the UAE, but whatever, she and her friends get a one-week, all expenses paid vacation to Abu Dabi out of the deal.

Prior to this, the story had been framed against the backdrop of change.  There seemed to have been an overarching theme of time, of age, and of settling into maturity.  Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is struggling with separation anxiety from her old life.  She misses the excitement of nights out on the town and hanging out with her friends.  Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is at odds with a difficult colleague at her law firm, making her working life a nightmare.  Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is at her wits' end with the stresses of motherhood, all the while plagued by the insecurity that her full-time nanny (Alice Eve) is way, way too hot for the job and that she might be losing her husband's (Harry Goldenblatt) attention in favor of the younger, bustier woman.  And Samantha is struggling to come to terms with the fact that she's getting older, and maybe her wildest days are behind her.

But who cares?  The Simpsons are going to Abu Dabi!  I mean women.  Women are going to Abu Dhabi.  Seriously?  Isn't that, along with cameos by B-list stars, pretty much the cliche of a TV show jumping the shark?  Wait a minute... isn't Liza Minelli in this movie?

And as we settled into the theater and the film started rolling, my suspicions about the decision to make this movie more of a location piece ultimately proved correct.  Rather than an endearing story about the struggles of an ensemble of female protagonists struggling to find love and happiness, it instead becomes a montage of four rich women bopping around rich scenery and doing rich things.  It's not so much a romantic comedy as it is pornography for housewives who are usually too polite for that sort of stuff.  The whole thing reads like a fan-fiction rather than a script written by someone who actually has any sort of understanding of the characters.  I'll explain:

The characters are too powerful (or: the dissolution of tension):  Remember in Superman Returns when Superman couldn't be stopped?  Like when he lifted an entire mountain of Kryptonite and flung it into space without too much trouble, and there was never really any doubt as to whether everything would be okay at any moment in the film?  Same thing here, and it's the primary reason I couldn't help but feel like I was watching a Sex and the City fanfic rather than a major motion-picture.  The suddenness of the protagonists being handed an all-expense-paid trip to Abu Dhabi is a fairly apt metaphor for the entire movie.  None of the characters ever have to earn anything.

SPOILERS:
There are too many examples to list.  First off, Carrie meets an old flame in an Abu Dhabi market.  You'd expect this to be the main conflict of the movie.  She's having a tough time with her husband, she's insecure and vulnerable.  She misses her old exciting lifestyle and isn't sure if she's cut out for the domestic life.  In a moment of weakness, she kisses the guy, and oh shit her marriage is in crisis!  But not really, she calls her husband, he's upset, and then she comes home and he's just like "don't do that again."

Okay, next: so in the excitement of seeing her old flame again, Carrie accidentally leaves her passport with a vendor at the marketplace.  Oh shit, she's stuck in the UAE with no way to get home!  Oh, no... no, never mind.  She remembers where she lost it and just goes back and asks for it.  She gets it back and... that's all.

Well damn, that could have been exciting.  Oh!  Samantha gets in trouble with the local authorities for making out with some dude on the beach.  They arrest her and take her into custody.  The women marshal themselves to her aid, with Miranda stepping up to represent Samantha as her lawyer.  It's kind of a stretch, but I suppose it could make for a good central conflict.  I'm sure they can get some funny scenes of life in a Middle Eastern prison and- oh, no, never mind.  They just call Samantha's Middle Eastern business partner and he bails her out.  Damn, I was hoping for some hot Middle Eastern women's prison action.

Ah!  Got it!  In light of Samantha's transgressions against the local authorities, her partner cancels the business deal and has them kicked out of the hotel.  Oh no!  They'll have to spend four days penniless and alone, trying to scrape by the in the real Abu Dhabi.  No more luxury and penthouses, they'll have to step onto the streets and try to make their way in the Middle East.  Maybe they'll suffer extreme hardship, or gain valuable insight into their own lives.  No, no, no, sorry.  Miranda calls the airport and has their tickets re-booked so they can leave immediately.  But what if they don't make it to the airport in time?????  They'll have to fly coach.  I'm not kidding.  That was literally the central conflict of the last half-hour of the movie.

END SPOILERS

It's everything the fans should want: The first sign of a movie franchise starting to wear thin is when the director starts throwing the fans everything they think fans are supposed to enjoy.  It's like serving a bowl full of sprinkles and a half-ounce of ice cream or wearing seventeen condoms to conceal that tiny, withered pea-pod you call a penis.  In either case, there's rarely any feeling or sensation to speak of and everyone leaves unsatisfied (on account of the diabetic coma).  In the TV series, the four women all have their own lives.  In the episodes that I've seen, most of the time the women are out dealing with their own problems and relationships.  It's when the pressures of the outside world become too great for one of them alone that they get together and discuss what's on their minds and hash out a solution.  They joke, they laugh, they vent, and part ways to ultimately come to a resolution.

The problem with Sex 2 is that the situation dictates the protagonists always be together.  Should be great, right?  The women getting together and screwing around is the best part of the show, right?  But without any context or conflict leading up to that point, it's totally meaningless.  Every scene seems designed for the sole purpose of getting all four women on-screen at the same time.  In one scene, Carrie went out to dinner with an old flame she met an old flame in the Abu Dhabi marketplace.  Like I said before, they end up kissing (for seemingly no reason other than to manufacture drama), and Carrie, in crisis, rallies the troops in her hotel room to get some advice.  She rushes to Samantha's room and finds her in the tub, Samantha says she'll be right there, and, true to her word, shows up in a towel, soaking wet, ready to come to her Carrie's aid.  What a great friend.

She says "don't tell him," and leaves.  She's on-screen for literally 30 seconds before losing interest and wandering off.  It took her longer to get out of the tub than she spent counseling her best friend.  So why bother putting her in the scene?  It's decisions like that that scream "cop-out."

The gang's all here... but why?:
Sex 2 is chock-full of secondary and ancillary characters from the show.  I didn't recognize a lot of them, but my wife seemed to appreciate them being there.  But none of them meant anything.  They pretty much showed up for a curtain-call and a wink to the audience.  It's just pandering for the sake of pandering, and insults the audience's intelligence.  It seems to me the show was built on a fairly robust ensemble cast, and yet the entirety of the movie seems to be focused entirely on the four main characters.  It's like they thought the audience would lose interest if the camera weren't constantly focused on them.

But focusing on our main characters all the time isn't without cost.  Sarah Jessica Parker looked so, so bored the entire movie.  I don't think I have ever seen someone who so clearly didn't want to be there make it into the final cut of the movie, except maybe the ghost haunting the set of Three Men and a Baby.

Pictured: The chilling vacant stare of the walking dead.

Also pictured: a cardboard cutout in the background of Three Men and a Baby

Allegory for Obama's presidency?:
Maintain the status quo at all costs.  That was pretty much the theme for the movie.  It's like they were so happy with the resolution of the first movie that they didn't want to mess anything up with any sort of drama or tension whatsoever in the sequel.  In the first movie, a lot happened.  People got married, people broke up, people came and went.  Things happened to move the story forward and affect a permanent change on the characters' lives.  Characters developed through ongoing struggles and an overarching plot-line spanned the entire narrative.  In the sequel, two ancillary characters get married in a union that isn't even recognized in 45 of the 50 states.  Oh, and Carrie wears a wedding ring.  That's all.

This reluctance to move the story forward, in spite of the numerous dramatic threads presented at the outset of the film, screams cash-in.  Tape together a few scripts for a couple of unfilmed episodes of the show, shoot it, and call it a sequel.  It's a boring, worthless, obnoxious waste of celluloid and I want my money back.

Verdict:
If you really, really, really want to see four beloved characters you remember from better times getting into fun, exciting adventures that will keep you on the edge of your seat, see The A-Team.  If you want two hours and fifteen minutes of schlock trying to turn a quick buck on a franchise past its prime, wait for Sex and the City 2 on DVD.