That's right, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristen Davis), Samantha (Kim Catrall), and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) return to the big screen for the first time in two years with new escapades, flirting with sex, but more importantly, with marriage and mid-life (or mid-wife as it is put here) crises involving their careers, their families, and their men.
The main man in question is Carrie's husband, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who is burned out on Carrie's party life and would prefer to sleep on the couch and watch movies with her. Carrie won't take none of that and hides out in her old apartment to write stories and escape reality. While this is going on, Charlotte and Miranda are having identity crises and Samantha has become addicted to anti-aging pills.
However, after pulling a few strings, Samantha manages to help the girls escape to Abu Dabi for a getaway, thanks to her PR job.
From there on out, it manages to take stabs at the conservative views of the radicals and the Burke-covered women while flaunting their wealth with shoes, brightly colored fashion, and butlers who end up teaching them things about themselves and their relationships.
To say the least, it's a step up from the first movie, which had too much going on in it's 2.5 hour story. Here, it's more centralized and common themes give it more of a concrete grounding. However, unless you are a woman, or an avid fan of the TV show, you may have difficulty swallowing the patent humor involving tongue-in-cheek sexuality and plenty of gay jokes, including special appearances by Liza Minelli and Miley Cyrus.
However, at two and a half hours, it does get tiring watching the iconic women kill time with elaborate conversations featuring a decent amount of filler that doesn't benefit the plot. The movie's real issue is not so much the plot, but the focus and it's editor, who in two films hasn't quite figured out how to put it below two hours into a reasonable length.
This is not to argue that length is the only issue. The original show is groundbreaking for managing to take relationships from a female perspective and empower it with sex and experiences. They were naive, awkward, and overall a fun half hour that helped launch HBO into more of a sophisticated comedy realm.
However, since they all have settled down, the experiences have become limited to children and husbands that make any of their normal behavior seem slutty and unbelievable for the two movies. Also, over the course of 2.5 hours, you also get the impression that they aren't very smart and as the time drags on, their endearment wears thin.
The show managed to make it work at 30 minutes because it knew what it wanted and summed the rest up in narrative. There was also quite a few years of absence between the show's cancellation and the first movie. Here, it's two years, and while it starts off with charm, around 80-90 minutes, you wish things were becoming more convenient instead of adding complexities.
Director Michael Patrick King is no Judd Apatow, who managed to make "Funny People" work at the same length. However, you kind of expect more from the guy who has directed everything involved with the franchise.
It also would be great if he knew how to keep them fresh and fun instead of the angsty agers they become. In the end, it's fun for fans of the show to see them on the big screen, but it's sad to see them not evolving as they had done on the show. Sure, it's a good time, but at times you have to wonder if they should have even made the movies just because there's a demand.
I'm one of those who believes the show was phenomenal, even ground breaking and entertaining. The movies, however, capture little, if any of that charm and only make these women seem like the average aging woman, which is their target audience. If this had been an hour shorter and better edited, then maybe this would be a fitting tribute to the show, but as for what it is, it's a fitting tribute to mediocre romantic comedies of 2010.
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