I Got Carried Away, Read Me My Miranda Rights, Who Are These Charlotte-ains, And…Something Something Samantha is a Slut

It’ll come as a surprise to absolutely no one to learn that I am very well acquainted with bad movies. Some of my favourite movies are bad movies. There are even people who would argue that ALL my favourite movies are bad movies, but they’re philistines. Hmph.

However, no amount of familiarity with tragic cinema could prepare me for the travesty that is Sex and the City 2.

Let me be clear: Sex and the City 2: Muslim Boogaloo is the WORST movie I have ever seen. And this is coming from someone who owns Street Fighter on DVD (what? It was $4.00. Call it anthropological documentation.)

And let me be clear about something else: I didn’t go to see this movie for enjoyment. I am not a fan of the show about, as Brian Griffin describes it, three hookers and their mum. However, after reading Lindy West’s side-splittingly acidic review, and then spending several evenings trawling the internet for other scathing reviews, The Baron, Lady Penelope, Princess Ukulele and I were compelled to see just how bad it is.

It surpassed all our expectations.

This movie, over the course of two and a half agonizing hours, managed to offend gay men, straight men, western women, Muslim women, Jews, Indians, Danes, flight attendants, redheads, the Australian Rugby team, adopted children, the Irish, nannies, screenwriters, costume designers, belly dancers, Helen Reddy, Beyoncé, Liza Minelli, yam farmers, butlers, the 80s, New Yorkers, married couples without children, milliners, the entire of Abu Dhabi, the entire cinema going public…and swans.

Especially swans.

Now, considering the movie managed to achieve so much between the opening and closing credits, you’d think it would be kind of a busy, action packed event? But oh, how you would be mistaken. When Sex and the City 2: Carrie On Up The Khyber isn’t offending everyone on the planet, it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It drags by so painfully slowly it makes Stephen King’s The Stand feel like a Robot Chicken sketch. There isn’t a single shot in the entire film that couldn’t be cut down by at least two seconds. It’s like the film wasn’t even edited. My theory is that it actually wasn’t – that the film’s assigned editor abandoned the set on day one. If I am right, then that person was the only one involved in this entire production with a clue. I know that if I was presented with a day’s worth of rushes from this travesty of a film I would have decided “oh, fuck this shit” and walked off too.

Watching Sex and the City 2: Sex and the Citier has left many reviewers with piles of snark, ready to distribute (did I mention Lindy West? Genius); but it has only left me with burning questions. Here are just ten of them:

1) For six years, Sarah Jessica Parker whinnied at anyone who would listen that the great city of New York was the unofficial fifth character of the series. This technically made it the only character to actually get a mention in the in the show’s title. If it is so important, why is so much of Sex and the City 2: Misogynypse Now set in an entirely different country? There’s very little sex, and very little city. If the title is meant to reflect the main feature of the piece, shouldn’t this film have been called Puns and the Ugly Hats?

2) Why did Penelope Cruz accept a completely inconsequential, four line cameo in this film? It’s not that I think she deserves better (she doesn’t), but what was the point of that? And if they were at a flashy New York event, why wasn’t she just playing herself?

3) Why was it necessary to say “gay wedding” 43 times in the first twenty minutes of the film?

4) Was it necessary to cram every single ridiculous gay stereotype that has ever existed into the gay wedding scene? It looked like the ‘Ascot Gavotte’ scene from My Fair Lady, (a genius description from Princess Ukulele) except somehow the hats in Sex and the City 2: The Emirate Strikes Back were even more farcical. If that’s how every gay marriage is supposed to start, I’m voting against them, too.

5) Exactly how badly does Michael Patrick King want Chris Noth to fuck him? And then marry him at a big gay wedding (gay wedding gay wedding gay wedding gay wedding)? The last ten minutes of the (interminably long) film seemed to me like MPK was writing his own personal love sonnet to the lumbering behem-Noth, and then veiling it—poorly—by substituting Carrie and Big for himself and his beloved Hunchback of Noth-re Dame.

6) What milliner hates Sarah Jessica Parker’s head so much they insist on covering it with detritus? I’ve never seen so many fucking ugly hats in one place, and I’ve been to the Mount Isa Rodeo. One minute she’s wearing the architrave from a Gotham City building as a headband, the next a sequined turban, after that what appears to be a cross between a giant oyster shell and a punch bowl.

7) Why, in one scene, is Samantha wearing the soundstage from Madonna’s last tour on her shoulders? In fact, at any point in the movie, what on earth are they wearing? Every single outfit in Sex and the City 2: Carrie Potter and the Deathly Shallows makes the fashion-based jokes in Absolutely Fabulous suddenly seem not quite so funny anymore. If you would like to recreate any of the fashions in this film, simply attach velcro to your shoulders, nipples and bottom, and then fire yourself out of a cannon into your nearest Lincraft. Whatever sticks? Outfit.

8) SPOILER (Please, keep reading, I’m doing you a favour): They escape at the end with hilarious disguises, AKA Burqa Wearing Shenanigans? Really? You know straits are dire when you’re borrowing heavily from Scooby Doo. Why not just get the four women to hide in giant urns, and sneak past some guards on tip-toe to the sound of a pizzicato violin?

9) If Samantha is that ignorant, how has she managed to live to, in her own words, fifty-fucking-two? Her failure to notice the world around her would surely have gotten her run over by a bus or something long before getting to Sex and the City 2: Puns on the Run.

10) Do all those people who howled at Ally McBeal back in 1997 for being “the death of feminism” wish they hadn’t jumped the gun?

In short, I did not enjoy Sex and the City 2: Slappers on Parade. Oddly enough, one of the things I hated most about the film was the number of times Sarah Jessica Parker’s character was referred to as “Carrie Preston”. I understand that is technically her character’s married name, but the film was so terrible it just made me feel bad for the actual Carrie Preston. She is lovely and talented and doesn’t deserve her good name to be associated with Samantha’s yam-smeared vagina.

Woops – that was a spoiler, wasn’t it? Of both plot and appetite. My apologies.