Traditionally, it’s not done for a film critic to walk out of a movie he or she is supposed to be reviewing, but I walked out of Sex and the City after an hour. It was unbearably dull and irritating and it all looked like a drawn-out rehash of the series that came and went and came and went on our TV screens.
Actually, I was just going for a smoke break, thinking that I’d return for the last half-hour with at least some refreshing nicotine in my blood. When I got to the smoking lounge at the Montecasino cinemas, however, I was confronted by one of the distributor’s staff members, surprised that I’d left the screening. Oh, I said, I’ll go back for the last half-hour.
I was then told that the movie was in fact two-and-a-half hours long. Two-and-a-half hours. There was no way I was going to go back and sit through another hour and a half of that utter boredom. I may be a film critic, but I am still human.
What on earth could the filmmakers have done with the plot to drag it out to two-and-a-half hours? (Actually, it’s two hours 20 minutes — call me a liar for 10 minutes.) There was no sign in the first hour that it would be anything but a roundelay of break-up and reconciliation. Already there had been two break-ups by the time I left and there are four main characters, so what’s left to do?
Perhaps that’s what happens when you make a movie from a TV series and pick up where the series ended. Given the nature of the storyline (four overdressed New York women and their love lives), that series’s climax naturally had to tie up all four in romantic partnerships: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) with her on/off/on/off flame ‘Mr Big”, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) with the father of her child, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) with her bald Jewish husband and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) with her actor boyfriend.
Then, when you make the movie, where to go but to start breaking them up? Or at least three out of four. I left the movie at the point when Carrie’s big flashy wedding to Mr Big had just collapsed and Miranda had already chucked out the very nice father of her child because he had a one-night stand with someone. She wasn’t having sex with him anyway, or hadn’t for months. Besides, he was, in my view at least, far too good for her. He was the only attractive person in the film, while she came across as a very annoying character with a pained expression permanently on her face.
And then there’s Samantha, the sex maniac of the quartet. She’s supposed to be outrageous and funny, but she isn’t. She seems quite fake. Samantha had obviously moved from New York to Hollywood at the end of the TV series, but luckily for the movie she is able to burn those fossil fuels at the drop of a hat and fly over to New York for a lot of girly screeching, which seems to be the Sex and the City sign for women happy to see one another. It is clear, within the first hour, that Samantha is now getting restless; her actor boyfriend is being very inconsiderate and going to bed early so he can be on set at 6am the next day.
My colleague, who stayed for another 20 minutes before joining me (and other audience members who’d given up and were waiting for the post-movie sweets), gave me some more plot points, but they are hardly worth going into. It was obvious that the rest of the movie was going to be more of the same, though I’d wager that in the end Carrie gets back together with Mr Big, doubtless after much talk with her friends — blah, blah, blahnik — That’s not a spoiler because I haven’t seen the rest of the movie.
And who cares? I certainly couldn’t be bothered. The film provoked in me a curious mixture of boredom and anxiety; anxiety because it’s doing its best to manipulate you emotionally and because you fear that you are going to be tortured with bad romance, silly dresses and arch chatter for what will feel like a long, long time.
In fairness Sex and the City is probably not my kind of movie or, to put it another way, I’m not in its target market. There were members of the audience who went ‘Oooh” at one moment and ‘Oh my God” at another. Apparently they even broke into applause at one point. I was gone by then. Such viewers were obviously absorbed by the film and cared what happened to Carrie et al. Maybe it’s just a chick flick and you’ve got to be a chick to get it — and, undoubtedly, a heterosexual one at that, perhaps even not very ‘liberated”, as the term ‘chick” implies. But I suspect that even such audiences will have more than a few moments of tedium.