I don’t often read movie reviews, and when I do it’s usually simply to ascertain whether or not the movie in question might have something interesting about it. Ever since Boys Don’t Cry, one of the most androphobic, man-hating movies ever produced, was almost universally hailed as a great work of art by critics, I’ve been pretty skeptical of their opinions.
In addition to my skepticism, I haven’t found movie reviews very entertaining in and of themselves, and generally simply used them for whatever factual information I could gather. However, Sex and the City 2 seems to have brought out the best in movie critics, who have panned the film with superlative gusto.
Manohla Dargis, writing for the NY Times, seems a bit taken aback by the critical drubbing the film received, but even amidst some protestation concerning implied sexism, ends up echoing much of it herself:
Fast forward to “Sex and the City 2,” the sequel to the hit 2008 movie, written and directed by Michael Patrick King, that has generated some of the most hostile and outraged reviews in recent memory. “The horror, the horror,” wrote one critic. “Nothing says putrefying, rotten and vile quite like this sequel,” wrote another.
[...]
The gravest of these sins in my unscientific survey are behavioral: the women act like ugly Americans and debase every aspect of Muslim culture they come in contact with. Also: they’re women. And middle aged. Girlish. Have had bad work done. Or maybe not enough. “A cross,” David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine “between (late) Mae West and (dead) Bea Arthur.” “Like a plastic surgeon,” Tom Maurstad wrote in The Dallas Morning News, “storyteller King keeps trying to find new ways to lift and tighten his characters, but they have become garish caricatures of themselves.” “What’s not to loathe?” Richard Roeper asked. Apparently nothing. At rottentomatoes.com, which compiles reviews, the first “Sex and the City” movie earned a 53 percent approval rating from top critics, while the sequel received — eek — just 9 percent.
[...]
The new film’s sex-capades turn on Carrie’s restlessness in her new marriage to Big (Chris Noth), an agitation she quiets during a junket to Abu Dhabi with “the girls”: Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis). After flying first-class-ultra in separate compartments, they are picked up at the airport in their own white Maybach sedans (which start at $417,000, in case you were wondering) and whisked to a hotel that’s a stand-in for the Emirates Palace, an haute-decadent Abu Dhabi hotel with amenities like a gold-dispensing ATM (“gold to go”).
Manohla writes a good – and amusing – review, which is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but she can’t hide the fact that her male colleagues may have ever-so-slightly hurt her feelings by bashing the cougar quartet:
The scene of Samantha in the souk has been branded insulting to Muslims. Certainly it’s insulting to comedy lovers and to the character, a shrewd number sold out by her director for an unfunny gag about the unruly female body. This and other scenes of the women with Muslims are often awkward, though that’s partly a function of Mr. King’s direction. Yet there’s also something touching about a few of these encounters, as when the women wonder how you eat fries when you’re wearing a veil, a question that strikes me as an uncharacteristically honest admission of difference in a mainstream American movie. Too bad the women weren’t guys and went to Las Vegas, where they could have indulged in the kind of critically sanctioned masculine political incorrectness that made “The Hangover” such a darling.
Fortunately, Thomas Leupp gives no quarter in his assessment of the film, which he refers to as “the new torture porn“:
Whereas the close of 2008’s Sex and the City found heroines Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristen Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) more or less getting everything they’ve ever wanted, the sequel finds them faced with the inconveniences that come along with having everything they’ve ever wanted.
[...]
Wilting under such stifling affluence, the four gal pals opt to flee on a whirlwind trip to the Abu Dhabi to recharge their collective engines — but not before a nearly hour-long first act involving a gay wedding, which allows writer/director/producer Michael Patrick King to get his fill of gay jokes and throw in a superfluous performance of Liza Minnelli singing Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies. And it’s just as disturbing as you’d expect.
[...]
Sex and the City 2 won’t win any awards (save for a few Razzies), but it could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers — provided they can endure the film’s two-and-a-half hour running time, of course.
Be sure to read both reviews — they are classics of critique.
