Review: Sex and the City — The Movie

Of the few episodes I have seen of the suc­cess­ful HBO series, I can say with con­fi­dence that the tele­vised incar­na­tion of Sex and the City is smarter, fun­nier, classier and all around more sig­nif­i­cant than the recently released film ver­sion. This wouldn’t be such a prob­lem if that laun­dry list of pos­i­tives didn’t apply to pretty much every film I’ve seen in the past year when stacked up against Michael Patrick King’s first foray onto the sil­ver screen. In the end, as with every male-driven action film that comes out around this time, qual­ity isn’t such a con­cern for the core audi­ence, who have come out in droves to instantly push this rom-com into the black. We’ll get to the ladies who turned out their pock­ets and bedaz­zled purses at the box office in a moment, but let’s start with the movie.

The film starts almost like any episode of the show, with a mod­i­fied title sequence that should a har­bin­ger of shlock to come. Instead of Carrie’s tutu-ed prance about town which ends with her get­ting splashed with muck, we are put through an awful mon­tage updat­ing us on the shows ups and downs over some ter­ri­ble popi­fied ver­sion of the theme song. Message: this is a fash­ion show of fool­ish­ness you are about to see.

Anyway, Carrie and Big decide to get mar­ried, he stands her up, girls road trip to Mexico, and a whole bunch of other stuff hap­pens. But it is kind of hard to fol­low all of it since there really isn’t a plot that can get us through the whole 2 hours and 20 min­utes. I’d say it’s like 4 episodes, but even then the sub­plots don’t hold up. There is only one char­ac­ter whose story I really liked watch­ing: Samantha. Nearing 50, she comes to terms with her own infat­u­a­tion with her­self in a clear and believ­able fash­ion. Unable to share a life with her young and buff beau for fear of her own infi­deli­ties, she must make a choice between her own hap­pi­ness and the adult “norm” her friends have all dis­cov­ered. I really believed in her strug­gle, so kudos.

As for the rest of the girls…

Carrie is too dumb to func­tion; Charlotte plays the fool too well to care all that much; Miranda’s sto­ry­line (divorce and redis­cov­ery) is yawnsville. Side char­ac­ters? Carrie’s assis­tant, Louise, is annoy­ing and I still can’t fig­ure out her exis­tence; Steve comes the clos­est to prov­ing that men aren’t as dumb as women think we are, but gets like six min­utes of screen­time; and Big is just enor­mous orange eye-candy who doesn’t say that much when he opens his mouth.

Look, Ladies, you deserve bet­ter. I’ve been say­ing it for years. What is the mat­ter with you? Don’t you know that this movie sucks? And if the fact that it sucks just doesn’t bother you, then I defer to “what is the mat­ter with you?”. Save for Samantha’s story, which I think is both relat­able and fab­u­lous (I went there), the rest of this movie just takes advan­tage of your own American predilec­tion towards shiny things (hand­bags, lim­ou­sines, Chris Noth) and sto­ry­book end­ings. And before you start jump­ing on me for not call­ing out guy movies for being bloated with the same gunk, let me offer up a great chick-flick: Enchanted. Also New York, also full of shiny things, even more of a sto­ry­book end­ing, but with a coher­ent storyline.

Sex and the City is one of the most suc­cess­ful R-rated films of all time (Hey MPK, if Apatow’s entourage can drop full frontal dick­age into Forgetting Sarah Marshall, why can’t you be so bold and earn your rat­ing!?) mostly from female auds. It seems that no one really liked it but enjoyed it enough yo allay any ill feel­ings. It blasted through expec­ta­tions for a sum­mer romantic-comedy, mak­ing over $50 mil­lion on the first week­end, which in a way really says a lot about the power of women at the box office, a demo­graphic that Hollywood has never really gone after because of their gen­eral low turnout dur­ing the heavy sum­mer months. You can expect more Sex like films down the line to try and get the almighty female dol­lar over the next year or two. So thank you, women who saw this movie, for break­ing down this impor­tant bar­rier. Feel free to go burn your bra and then go buy an over­priced one on 5th Avenue.

Or you could direct a movie rel­e­vant enough to pull in those kinds of num­bers, instead of let­ting a man do it for you.