Sex and the City’s foray to the big screen essentially bloats a fairly standard TV episode to inconceivable proportions. The 148-minute end product is in effect one gargantuan fix of the show, which had its emancipated heroines riding into the sunset in 2004 after six loved and lauded seasons. This is not necessarily a bad thing: die-hard fans, who used the show as a compass of cool, will be happy as hell.
The film is made for them and as such it is a success. Those who do not count themselves as Sex and the City aficionados will probably spend the most boring two-and-a-half hours of their lives, and they should enter the theatre at their own peril. The third segment of the audience, consisting of people who found their channel surfing occasionally interrupted by the TV show’s smart and ironic dialogue about sexual politics, will probably be mildly disappointed.
The latter group is best equipped to give an honest assessment of what’s on offer. They would come to the theatre expecting to be entertained by some inconsequential witty banter, but instead would get nonstop blather about orgasms or their lack thereof. The foursome of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (Kristin Davies) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) have grown older but not wiser. They are now in their forties, but they seem to be living in a time bubble and their interests do not seem to have moved on a jot.
Carrie is still with Mr Big (Chris Noth) and they even contemplate marriage and a family nest. Samantha is doing her PR thing in California and enjoys life with her only client, Smith (Jason Lewis) who is a day-time TV star of sorts. Charlotte is now a doting wife and as uptight an object of fun as ever. Miranda is too occupied being a lawyer and does not seem to have enough time for her nice guy of a husband (David Eigenberg). The plotting machine conspires to get the four of them together in a luxurious Mexican resort where they can indulge in what they do best for the benefit of their die-hard admirers. The bad thing is that witty dialogue, the show’s hallmark, is ostensibly lacking here. The quartet’s exchanges are trite and full of cliches; Carrie’s narration comes and goes with a helpless randomness.
Each of the heroines is allotted enough screen time to deal with their assortment of romantic crossroads and complications, but they are either too familiar or too far-fetched and one would think they would have hardly qualified for treatment in the show proper. Writer-director Michael Patrick King, who did the job admirably well on TV, falls short when it comes to delivering the goods in feature length. His attempts to balance humour and outrage fail on several occasions and seem to take proceedings dangerously close to Adam Sandler territory: there is a compulsive masturbating dog, Samantha is covering her nether parts in sushi; Charlotte is treated to a poop joke and what have you.
The end result of King’s chosen gambit is that neither the four heroines nor the male objects of their designs come across as anything remotely human and it is difficult for an uninitiated or even a mildly sympathetic viewer to care about any of them. The one breath of humanity comes in the form of Carrie’s assistant Louise (Jennifer Hudson), although Carrie has got to be the first freelancer of this type who could afford an assistant like this on top of everything else that she can afford.
