MOVIE REVIEWS: “SEX AND THE CITY 2”

The Memorial Day weekend is coming up — a time for remembering the dead, and, in the case of Sex and the City 2, even a dead television series. The movie is opening tonight (Wednesday) in some markets — in an apparent effort to grab women who have been granted an extra-long holiday. Critics would just as soon let the whole matter be forgotten. The new movie is, writes Claudia Puig in USA Today, “an insult to the memory of the cleverly written show and its celebration of friendship.” Or, as Kyle Smith puts it in the New York Post: “The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.” Those characters, writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, “make my skin crawl … flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.” Sex and the City 2, he says, amounts to yet another depiction of “the trivialities of their lives.” Amy Diluna, described by the New York Daily News as a “guest reviewer” (she’s the newspaper’s fashion editor), concludes that “the clothes and scenery are sublimely sparkly and the zippy zingers fly. … [but] this movie is like once-brilliant Champagne, carelessly left out overnight. And gone flat.” Peter Howell in the Toronto Star uses a similar metaphor: “The fizz is definitely off the champagne of the continuing saga,” he writes, adding, “Film franchises usually don’t flatline this quickly. This Sex feels more like a tired fourth go than a triumphant second.” Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail awards it just one-half of a star, and his entire review amounts to an explanation of why he has given it even that, concluding, “But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star: It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.” Indeed, most of these same critics had ripped the first movie — but not like they have shredded the latest one. As Betsy Sharkey writes in the Los Angeles Times: “When the girls first went big screen in 2008, the film could be forgiven for being such a dreary dud because it was so good to have the gold-plated four pack back. But there’s no free lunch for 2.”