Review: ‘Sex and the City’ movie falls short

BY DANIEL NEMAN
Media General News Service
Published: June 6, 2008

Here’s probably what happened at HBO Films.

Some executive saw that the new “Sex and the City” movie clocked in at two hours and 20 minutes and wondered if there were any way the filmmakers could trim some of the fat out of the picture.

He probably told them to make sure that nothing they cut affected the story.

And then the filmmakers must have watched the movie again and realized the awful truth: There isn’t any story.

Two hours and 20 minutes long, and almost nothing happens.

This is the entire plot: Something sad happens to the character played by Cynthia Nixon, and then something sad happens to the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker. Then they mope and mope and mope until finally — finally — it comes time to stop moping and end the picture.

Meanwhile, the character played by Kim Cattrall talks about sex a lot, and the character played by Kristin Davis . . . um . . . well, she squeals a few times. She seems to have been included for comic relief, and it is just sad for a comedy to need comic relief.

Parker, Nixon, Cattrall and Davis, of course, play Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, the television foursome who made cosmopolitans so popular. (A self-aware joke about that is one of the few that work, though it isn’t funny.)

They talk about relationships and they talk about sex, and every possible chance they get they walk four abreast. But most important, they always support one another when things look bleak.

Except in this movie. In this movie, when Carrie is at her absolute lowest, it is a brand-new and narratively unnecessary character who, as Carrie puts it, “gave me back my life.” And then this new character disappears from the movie.

Carrie, our heroine, is slightly amusing but utterly shallow. Her friends are similarly one-dimensional — they’re like characters on a sitcom.

And the man with whom she is famously in love, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), seems to have had the personality pried out of him with a crowbar.

The only reason shown in the movie for her great love is the fact that he can afford what is surely a $5 million penthouse.

Not having HBO at the time, I watched only a few episodes of “Sex and the City” when it was on television, though I enjoyed it when I saw it.

Unfortunately, writer-director Michael Patrick King does not seem to have made the transition from 30-minute TV show to full-length (and then some) movie.

The same old television tropes don’t work on the big screen, but King tries them anyway, and we quickly tire of all the inconsequential crises followed by immediate resolutions.

Fans of “Sex and the City” will be happy just to see their favorite characters back on the screen, just as fans of the Indiana Jones films were to see theirs, no matter how mediocre the result.

But even the fans must want more from this movie than the constant idolization of clothing. Most of the two hours and 20 minutes is spent with the women buying clothes, trying them on and occasionally slipping out of them.

And if you don’t think every single designer is mentioned by name, and every store logo given prominence, you just aren’t paying attention.

“Sex and the City” isn’t a delightful opportunity to spend time with four well-loved friends as they move through their lives.

It’s just a deceptive and creepy advertisement for overpriced clothes.

Daniel Neman is a staff reporter at Media General’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.