Sex and the City

Even if you’ve already seen the spoiler wedding gown that makes Carrie Bradshaw look as though she’s taking a bath in a pile of Styrofoam, you and I both know that you simply must check in with the old girls and their Vuitton bags one more time before they graduate from Botox to assisted living. Think again: Less a movie than a long goodbye (again), at 142 minutes, Sex and the City adds up to little more than a season’s worth of episodes (outtakes?) slung together to squeeze all remaining revenues from an exhausted franchise. Plotless and pointless, the movie shows that writer-director Michael Patrick King is in way over his head working on the big screen. The trippy, backtalking, très gay script that was the series’ lifeblood sags into garden-variety sitcom sassiness, and despite the pubic hair, well-hung penis, and mildly graphic Malibu copulating that won the movie its R rating, there are more bad sex jokes than good sex. Waving feebly at the youth demographic, the movie drafts a terrified-looking Jennifer Hudson as Carrie’s new assistant. But what truly undoes Sex and the City is its wavering lack of commitment to its middle-aged target audience, its trashy retail aesthetic, and the deeper theme of urban loneliness, which King mushes up with, of all things, a lecture on materialism—followed up by $525 Manolos.