Sex crimes

The people behind Sex and the City 2 want you to think their film is about female empowerment and how to wield it. I say it’s about totally vacuous assholes wearing clothes that will look idiotic in 10 years.

The first film adapted from the HBO series, a show I enjoyed, was a mixed bag. It had its charms but was too damned long, and poor Kristin Davis shitting her pants was a bit much.

With this sequel, Sex and the City wears out its welcome with a movie that embarrasses each of its once enjoyable characters. It feels like a thrown-together, rushed parody of the show.

Predictably, it opens with Carrie (the still hot Sarah Jessica Parker) having marital troubles with Mr. Big (Chris Noth). The stupid bastard doesn’t know how to treat his wife. He puts his shoes on the couch (Gasp!), wants to stay home after a hard day’s work (Whoa!), and has the gall to buy Carrie a flatscreen TV instead of jewelry for their anniversary (Kill him!). Carrie pisses and moans, making me wish Big would just flip her the bird, grab his cool TV, and get the hell out of there.

Samantha (the annoying Kim Cattrall, moaning all of her dialogue) has secured a crazy-assed trip for her and her mates to visit Abu Dhabi, which means many shots of the girls in turbans and genie pants. It also means the girls spend much of the movie out of Manhattan, which sucks.

I liken this movie to a boxing match for which I was ill-prepared. I was in the ring with no headgear when the film started. By the time Samantha made her first dreadful appearance, I took a pretty good shot to the temple. When Carrie started bitching at Mr. Big over minutia, I took a low blow, and when the girls belted out “I Am Woman” during an Abu Dhabi karaoke session, the film caught me with a haymaker that put me down for the count.

It’s stuff like the pitiful karaoke moment that tells you writer-director Michael Patrick King must’ve gone into this movie with a script consisting of Post-Its and scribbling on the back of cereal boxes. His script actually calls for Carrie to bump into ex-boyfriend Aidan (John Corbett) while buying shoes in some Abu Dhabi back alley. Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

A big subplot involves Samantha having hot flashes due to menopause. The film tries to milk laughs out of her gobbling hummus for the chickpea estrogen and putting yams all over her face. The sight of Cattrall with hummus all over her mouth is not pretty.

Don’t give me any crap about me not being in this film’s demographic. The demo for Sex and the City used to be smart, inquisitive males and females who liked daring humor about sex and relationships with maybe the occasional joke about farts. That’s the demo I, and many folks I know, rest squarely in. Talk about your vagina or penis, make a clever observation about Manhattan nightlife and how it weighs on your soul, and then perhaps a light fart. Laughter ensues.

Now, the damned franchise has devolved into targeting a demo consisting of people who like stupid ugly hats and jokes about the full-on shitting of pants. No, Kristin Davis doesn’t shit her pants this time, but she’s the embarrassing center of a cameltoe joke. She falls off a camel and then the girls laugh at her cameltoe. Get it?

The best part of the movie—the only part of the movie I enjoyed—is Liza Minnelli singing and dancing to a Beyonce song at a gay wedding early in the film. Seriously, this had me sitting up in my seat thinking we might be onto something with this flick. Then the plot kicked in and Liza went away, leaving us alone with Carrie and her evil cabal of lame caricatures.

It’s time to stop.