Movie Review: Sex and the City 2 (2010)

Sex and the City 2 (2010)

Directed By:
Michael Patrick King

Starring:
Carrie: Sarah Jessica Parker
Samantha: Kim Cattrall
Charlotte: Kristin Davis
Miranda: Cynthia Nixon
Mr. Big: Chris Noth


The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain

Watching Sex and the City 2 was like being tortured by a fabulously dressed James Bond villain with a persecution complex. It is cinematic torture in three parts. Part one, the hood you wore on the way to the theatre is ripped off, and you find yourself tied to your seat while the movie douses you with gasoline. Part two, the movie begs you to understand it; both its reason for being the way it is and the reason it has tied you to a chair and doused you with gasoline. By the time we get to part three, which is immolation, we’re just happy that it’s stopped talking about itself and has moved on to degrading a wholly new set of people.

The events of Sex and the City 2 pick up after the first movie, which picks up after the TV show, which dealt with the lives and loves of a group of middle aged New York women who wear clothes and have sexual appetites belonging to people half their age. All but one of the four women is married, but since Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) is the only one of them still having sex or having fun or making headway with her job, the unmarried one is, for a time, the happy one, even if the time she doesn’t spend in bed with somebody is consumed by her quest to avoid menopause with what must be the world’s largest supply of hormones. She is also the one who enables the other three to get away from their unhappy lives. Let’s sum them up:

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) just got married to Mr. Big (Chris Noth), and the two of them have moved in to a posh Manhattan apartment. Carrie loves Big and Big loves Carrie, but it’s apparent that Carrie doesn’t really love the idea of being married, as all Big wants to do is spend time with her. He orders takeout and has designs on watching old movies on high-def television with her. She never really tells him what she wants to do instead, but old movies and take out are an egregious enough offence that she decides to take a break from Big to go back to her old apartment so she can finish writing a magazine article. Elsewhere in the city, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has quit her job as a lawyer at an upscale law firm because she hates her boss and wants to spend more time with her family; and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) tries to be a mother while lacking the common sense necessary to avoid wearing vintage leather around children with paint, so most of the duty of raising her children goes to the nanny, who is Irish and big breasted and usually braless, to the delight of the husbands in the movie. She’s worried that her husband is cheating on her with the nanny, but can’t fire her lest she be forced to look after her clothes-ruining progeny without help.

All of that is part two of the torture bits, neatly and innocuously sandwiched between a gay wedding and an all expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi. Having never been to a gay wedding, I can only hope that the straight guests to one aren’t constantly awed by how gay the proceedings are. Having never been to Abu Dhabi, I can only observe that Sex and the City 2 was actually filmed in Morocco and probably couldn’t find Abu Dhabi on a map.

The gay wedding is between Carrie’s gay best friend and Charlotte’s gay best friend, and that’s exactly what they’re referred to as. They’re not really anybody’s best friend, or the modifier “gay” wouldn’t really be necessary. With swans, Liza Minelli, and a tux-clad Carrie as the maid of honor, it serves as an excuse for everybody to notice how gay it is. Mr. Big takes it one step further, telling his wife no less than four times that he can’t believe he’s at a gay wedding. The two gay men get married and disappear quickly, but not before some sad dialog about the unlikelihood of their marriage and one spouses’ willingness to let the other cheat on him, so long as it’s in one of the many states that don’t yet recognize gay unions. Then Carrie and Big watch an old movie, and the troubles start.

I’d like to think that a group of friends who meet and talk about the problems in their lives would come up with a better solution than bailing out on said problems to take a whirlwind trip to Abu Dhabi. We’ve got one mom who wants to spend more time with her kids, one mom who doesn’t want to lose her kids to the nanny, and a woman who is worried that the week she took away from her marriage will become a recurring thing. Flying halfway around the world doesn’t exactly solve any of that, but the promise of Arabic Pringles and magic carpet rides overtakes anybody’s commitment to living in reality, and off they go.

This is where Samantha gets in trouble, because her hormones are banned substances. Also, as it turns out, the middle east, even Abu Dhabi, isn’t the kind of cultural paradise the four expect, as women still wear bhurkas and don’t fellate men on the streets, or whatever they were expecting. Their interactions with the natives, at best, border on casual racism. At their worst, the girls are like oversexed George W. Bushes, clumsily liberating a silently suffering people in the name of what’s right for them. There are some very uncomfortable scenes involving Arabic women in this movie, like when a woman wearing a bhurka compliments Carrie on something she’s wearing, only to be ignored, which happens right after the four stare at her eating French fries under her veil. Towards the end, a group of Arabic women save Carrie and company from a group of irate men and reveal that they’re secretly just as airheaded and vapid as their Dior-clad American counterparts.

And why are a bunch of men upset with the four? Well, it all starts when Samantha, who has been on a steady diet of yams and hummus (which she eats on white toast, which makes no sense whatsoever) to thwart the wrath of menopause, finally locks her eyes on a particularly mean boner after having been awash with them without arousal for days. “Lawrence of my labia!” she exclaims after a brief courtship, grabbing his crotch in full view of a bunch of people at a restaurant. The movie wants us to feel that the anger on the behalf of the Arabic (I won’t say “Muslim” because SATC2 doesn’t bring religion up once, despite Miranda’s constant quoting of Wikipedia) man is unjustified and that things need to change, not realizing that that sort of behavior isn’t exactly de rigueur in an American’s sense of acceptable public displays of affection, either. So they’re kicked out of their hotel and have minutes to get to the airport before they’re sentenced to fly back to America in coach (seriously, that’s their biggest worry. Also terrible is when Miranda and Charlotte, rich women with nannies and maids, raise a glass to mothers who don’t have help), but Carrie lost her passport in some spice bazaar, so they have to go and find it. Samantha’s purse winds up getting emptied in the middle of the market, and lo, there were condoms. Lots of condoms.

Angry men start screaming at the westerner in the tacky clothes with the purse full of condoms. Instead of apologizing and making her way to the airport, some mental switch flips to “Fuck it,” and she starts yelling back at the men. “Yes, I have sex!” There are the appropriate pelvic thrusts, the expected moral outrage, and even the classic bit where the girls disguise themselves in other people’s clothes to escape detection, which happens in every movie where white people need to get away from an angry foreign horde. They go back to New York, where you can sleep with men on the subway if you want to, and the ending ties a neat little bow on everything.

So Sex and the City 2 is a humorless, classless movie pretending to be a commentary on marriage and the modern woman. A bunch of 40-something women refuse to grow up, treating Bloomingdales, gay weddings and Abu Dhabi as their personal playgrounds, and I guess along the way I was supposed to feel sorry for the really rich women who don’t want to watch TV, who don’t know how to be mothers and who don’t recognize their hot nannies for lesbians. It’s hard to feel sorry for caricatures, especially when they spend a lot of time talking about how sorry they are for the people who aren’t them. It's easy to see why they're sympathetic: Whatever they ruin, they can buy another one of. Whatever you do with your life, you can't get the two hours you spend watching this back.