Premise: Carrie Bradshaw & Co. return. Again.
Stars: Sarah Jessica-Parker * Kim Cattrall * Cynthia Nixon * Kristin Davis * Chris Noth
Story: Carrie Bradshaw (SJP) is having a crisis in adjusting to marriage. Charlotte (Davis) is having a crisis in dealing with an attractive nanny. Miranda (Nixon) is having a crisis in balancing family and work. Samantha (Cattrall) is having a crisis dealing with menopause. After witnessing the marriage of their two gay friends Stanford and Anthony, Samantha gets an offer from a sheikh to visit Abu Dhabi and set up a PR campaign for his new hotel. She accepts only on the condition that all four women can go.
Thus the scene is set for hijinks as cultures clash.
Review: Trash.
Okay, that's coming from a guy who never watched the series (maybe all of 10 minutes of a single episode) or the first movie. But seriously. We've got four fashion mavens who extol the "virtues" of Western society, which in this case means wearing fancy and expensive (and quite commonly ugly) clothes, paying lip service to equality and fraternity with benighted minorities (gay men in the West, women in the Middle East) and avoiding the larger issues at hand.
I can't quite tell if the film is supposed to be a satire of Western values or not. Suffice it to say that the film may have had the intent of offending as many people as possible. And it succeeds.
Carrie Bradshaw serves as "Best Man" to her gay BFF Stanford and argues the point with her newly minted husband "Mr. Big" (Noth) that it's a "marriage", not a "gay marriage", yet the film portrays the wedding with lavish style and pomp, including a chorus of gay men in white suits and Liza Minelli ("Okay", she concedes later, "it's a gay wedding.") Both grooms (called "brooms" in their description, to combine "bride" and "groom") are outlandish in the extreme, and confess that Stanford gets the wedding while Anthony gets to cheat on him in the 45 states where gay marriage isn't legal.
Due to an offhanded comment by Samantha, Charlotte spends most of the film worried that her husband (played by Evan Handler, otherwise known as the dead guy in the bathrobe that visits Hurley in Lost) may cheat on her simply due to the nanny's large breasts and habit of going braless. Miranda is a successful attorney that has little time for family life, owing to a new boss. Samantha spends the running time of the movie complaining about her lack of libido due to anti-drug laws in Abu Dhabi. All three are succinctly resolved by a few lines of narration by Carrie at the end of the film. (Charlotte's nanny is a lesbian, Miranda quit and found a better job, Samantha is overwhelmed by lust for a Danish architect they met in Abu Dhabi).
The film's main concern is not any development on the part of the characters - all four start with an issue, gloss over it until the end, and have a short reconciliation of the matter due to either alcohol or narration. Apparently, the main concern is "Women need a break every once in a while from being married."
And I left out the innumerable shots of erections, men in speedos, bare-chested beefcake, fashion and glitz. I discovered I'm really not the audience for this, but apparently teenage girls (Miley Cyrus appears), women with unsatisfied lives (I can't count the number of sighs, oohs, and ahs I heard from the group of women sitting near me), and gay men (likewise).
Is this film really the appropriate venue for a discussion of how Abu Dhabi wastes its income on glitz in an attempt to become the financial hub of the Middle East? Probably not - but one sees ample food laid out untouched by the four women when they dine. The audience is treated to the method of employment used by businesses in Abu Dhabi - hire out cheap labor from other poor countries in order to serve themselves and Western visitors. Yet, it's only superficially touched upon by the film in order to serve the interests of the question of taking a break from marriage; the response by the Indian butler is that every time he and his wife get together, it is like meeting again for the first time.
Miranda spends the time in Abu Dhabi attempting to learn Arabic and some of the customs. She even tries to convince Samantha to dress modestly. Yet, in most of the shots of Carrie and Charlotte, deep cleavage is revealed, their familiarity with the men around them is suspect (apparently being intelligent doesn't lead them to hear of stories of Westerners getting arrested and/or deported for activities offensive to the natives), etc. Eventually it redounds to Samantha "kissing" the Danish architect (named Rikard Spirit, but dubbed "Dick Spurt" by Samantha) on the beach and getting arrested, which leads the women to getting basically kicked out of the country.
This sets up a slightly comic scene as the four are rushing to leave the country and Carrie discovers that during a shopping trip, she left her passport at a vendor's stand. For the last twenty minutes of the film, the four are crying about being possibly forced to fly coach (oh, the humanity) back to the States while they are subject to a) trying to locate the passport b) getting derailed into a sleazy counterfeit shop c) confronted by angry men when Samantha's purse spills condoms onto the ground (while wearing a revealing top and shorts in a "conservative" area d) discover that women in Abu Dhabi society secretly wear the latest New York fashions under their burqas and e) have to deal with ancient cabs. Not to mention that they brought a trainload of luggage to the Middle East that somehow ends up on the airplane with them, even though no effort was made to ensure its arrival at the airport.
The only thing that actually made me chuckle was the cameo by Ron White as Miranda's new boss. But even this has made me think, is this an intended slight at blue-collar America? Take a very funny comedian that rustic America likes and label him as a misogynist asshole?
The film has its audience. Perhaps they liked it. I know that I didn't.
Overall: Bad
Other Sites: Wikipedia * IMDb * AllMovie * Rotten Tomatoes
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