Eight Reasons Sex and the City 2 is no Sex and the City

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My friend convinced me to watch Sex and the City two months ago. I’d always shrugged it off with mild distaste as a more promiscuous version of Desperate Housewives but I was captivated from Episode One with the wit, the characters and, yes, the couture. It was one-half escapism (the clubs, the Manolos, the penthouses), one-half brutal reality, with HBO-grade graphic sex (not usually flattering), embarrassing STDs and constant heartbreak. It was a masterful combo.

I finished the last episode a week ago, just in time to watch Sex and the City 2. I’ve never been so let down. I was irritated when I read the Roger Ebert review earlier this week, after all, Sex and the City has always been a series for its fans—ridiculous, but also kind of wonderful. "The characters of “Sex and the City 2” are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row," he wrote, and I fumed. How dare he talk about Samantha and Miranda and Carrie and Charlotte like that? Then I saw the movie, and realized that the gauze-clad, continent-hopping, responsibility-shirking women in this horrible movie are not my beloved characters, and this franchise is a far cry from the show. Here’s why:

(In case you haven’t watched it, Big and Carrie are married and bored with each other, Charlotte has two daughters, Samantha is still sleeping around and doing PR and Miranda lives in Brooklyn with Steve and Brady. And then they go to Abu Dhabi.)

1. The Puns
While the show was known for its cheesy humor—“Everywhere I looked people were standing in twos. It was like Noah’s Upper West Side rent-controlled ark.”—the movie pounds you with wordplay that’s not so much groan-inducing as it is cringe-worthy, like “Mid wife crisis,” and, horribly, “Interfriendtion” (not once, but three times!).

2. There’s No Sex!
Or very little of it. One of the things I loved about the HBO series was how it demystified and de-sexy-fied sex. There were no fading lights, no swirling orchestras, no cut-to-blacks. Phoebe and Monica and Rachel were able to sleep with as many people as they wanted without facing crabs or clamidia or strange-tasting bodily fluids but SATC‘s Manhattan showcased the weird, awkward repercussions of free love like nothing before, and despite their couture and $300 shoes and glitzy jobs, the four women were deeply human because of it. In the movies, they’ve all grown up and gotten married (except Samantha, of course, who does engage in a few graphic trysts) and while the writers could have woven a different kind of tension from this, they chose instead to cast Miranda and Charlotte sitting at a bar in a Middle Eastern hotel getting giggly-drunk off of something pink and toasting the “women who don’t have help,” a.k.a, full-time servants. SATC has always been a giddy fantasy, but the sex tied it to reality, and without it, it’s hard to care.

3. The Gay Factor
SATC has never been good at fleshing out its gay characters. In the show, the gay men are mostly one-dimensional caricatures, whose sole purposes are a). providing the girls with diva-ish BFFs, and b). showing us how (aw!) progressive they are. SATC2 takes these garish cutouts and blows them up on the big screen with a decadent wedding between Stanford (Carrie’s GBFF) and Anthony (Charlotte’s GBFF), featuring swans, a boys’ choir singing “Sunrise, Sunset” and Liza Minelli (“Whenever there’s this much gay energy, she materializes,” Miranda whispers). And while the stereotypes are bad enough, the vapid indulgence of the other characters’ attitudes is much, much worse. “Gay” is said upwards of 15 times in the first 10 minutes by the women and their husbands, always followed by a titillated laugh or a self-congratulating smile and, really, their reaction makes sense—in the world of SATC2, homosexuality is nothing but a joke.

4. The Clothes
“It’s just like Aladdin, with cocktails,” Carrie says of Abu Dhabi and the women live up to her comparison by dressing like menopausal Disney princesses.