Reel Review : Sex And The City 2

Two years after the end of the first film, we return to Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. Carrie is married and beginning to feel a little restless, Charlotte is struggling with motherhood, Miranda hates her job and Samantha... well, you know Samantha.

*** This review will contain spoilers ***

The Good:

Fashion porn. I got off so many times. My absolute favorite dress was the dress Miranda wore to Standford/Anthony's Wedding. Miranda has always been my favorite and during most of the series the wardrobe department really gave her the cast offs but that dress made up for all those years of frumpy blandness. Second favorite being the throwback newspaper paper dress Carrie wore on her date with big. It's from my favorite Episode " What Goes Around Comes Around " so i got extremely giddy.

The Chemistry: The dynamic between the 4 women is still there. It's palpable the love that these 4 characters have for each other. Regardless of what's going on behind the scenes, I never once thought, "Hey, those 2 hate each other in real life."

Favorite scene: Miranda and Charlotte's scene. It was genuine and funny.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Aidan storyline. I really liked how he remained married with kids and how, apart from that one kiss, they didn't "cheat." I was also pleasantly surprised that Carrie immediately regretted the kiss and realized it meant nothing.

The Ok:

I thought the Carrie/Big stuff kind of worked and kind of didn't. I thought the big issue between them wasn't all that big, but both of them felt the need to take a small thing like Carrie wanting to go out more vs. Big wanting to stay at home and blow it up into something huge. And Big's dramatic reaction to Carrie confessing to kissing Aidan was over the top. I mean, these are two people who fucked around while Carrie was dating Aidan, but Big is going to act sanctimonious over a kiss that Carrie swore meant nothing? Give me a break.

The Bad:

I really disliked Anthony and Stanford's wedding. The whole thing was treated as a big joke, and felt like kind of a slap at gay fans of the series. It bugs me that Anthony made a point during the series that he and Stanford weren't going to like each other just because they were both gay, but here he and Stanford are together, for no real reason except both characters happen to be gay and it served the storyline.

A great majority of the dialogue is extremely hacky. Some of those line those women had to utter, especially Samantha, were cringeworthy. I expected to hear canned laughter or a rimshot after some of her lines. It was ridiculous. I will say that Samantha's "Lawrence of MyLabia" and Miranda's "Abba -Dabi Do" were funny.

The karaoke scene was AWFUL. It took me right out of the movie. The scene should've been cut.

The commentary about females in Muslim culture was heavy-handed at best and uninformed at worst.

The selling point for the show and the first movie was definitely the dynamic between the four women and that was true here, too--both as a group and the smaller interactions. They were by far my favorite part of the movie, and brought my attention back when it wandered. I appreciated finally hearing how the four met (and seeing eighties versions of them).

B-