Review by Brian Tallerico

To put things in context and fend off any accusations of my gender rendering me incapable of competently appraising the film version of Sex and the City, a caveat is required - I've seen every episode of the landmark HBO series. Not only did I watch the show because I sometimes do work as a TV critic alongside film, but, believe it or not, even some of us straight males can admit it was a damn good comedy. In its prime, Sex and the City deserved every one of its numerous accolades and arguably more. It was one of the best written and acted programs on television and you can see its influence on countless programs that followed it. On the other hand, it should also be noted that I don't watch the show in reruns, don’t own it on DVD, and think it went downhill in the last few seasons. So, I'm what you would call a semi-casual fan, far from completely unfamiliar with the concept, but the show is also not on any sort of pedestal that a film version could sully. Now that the confession is out of the way, the big-screen version of Sex and the City fails more miserably than any multi-episode arc of the series that ever aired on HBO. I’d take any four or five episodes from any year of the series over the movie. It's a cluttered and shallow mess with only a few glimpses of what it could have been with a more competent director, some idea of what made the show work, sixty fewer minutes, and a screenplay with a dozen or so edits.

Just in case you're unfamiliar with the concept, Sex and the City is based on the best-selling work of author Candace Bushnell. Primarily, it's the story of four close female friends – Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte – and their adventures in love and loss. When we last left the ladies who drink cosmos, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the writer, had finally been united with her series-long on-again-off-again true love John J. Preston (Chris Noth), aka Mr. Big. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) got back together with Steve (David Eigenberg) to raise their son and continued to juggle being a mom with being a high profile attorney. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) was happily married to Harry (Evan Handler) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) jetted off to Los Angeles with her hunk Smith (Jason Lewis) to manage his growing acting career. In just the opening few scenes of Sex and the City, Carrie decides to move in with and marry Big, Miranda breaks with Steve after he cheats on her, and Samantha must have more frequent flyer miles than a U.S. Marshall considering how often she jets to NYC to see her friends. Eventually, Carrie hires an assistant named Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who shows her that love and forgiveness are more important than designer purses and shoes and that even an Oscar winner can be wasted in a thankless role.

Imagine the seventh season of Sex and the City that never happened crammed into a theatrical “Cliffs Notes” version. The screenplay for SATC feels like a season’s worth of multi-episode arcs for every one of the four major characters plus ways to get all of their significant others in the plot and maybe even add a new one or two. Now compress all of that character action into 142 minutes. (Yes, Sex and the City is 20 minutes longer than No Country For Old Men, but I'll get to that later.) The result makes SATC feel both overly complex and shallow simultaneously - the former because every one of the four women gets an arc that would have required multiple episodes to handle and the latter because they have to be tied up in neat bows in the running time (as bloated as it may be) of a single movie. So, we get a wedding, a pregnancy, a break-up, infidelity, and much more, all in one summer comedy.

It's all way more than writer/director Michael Patrick King can handle. The light-on-its-feet air of the show has been replaced with crass commercialism and the smell of desperation. The first hour of Sex and the City feels like King has gone completely on overload, pushing everything that's popular about the show up to eleven in an overly eager desire to please the fans. The musical montages, the fashion shows, the shoes, the raunchy talk, the excessive spending - King goes quickly from trying to please people to practically begging them to love his movie. When the movie finally settles down and starts to feel believable in the second hour, it's just too late and, in a lot of ways, too depressing. Nixon does decent work with her arc - she was always the best actress on the show - and there are a few scenes between her and Parker that are effective, but Davis plays everything at eleven (she has one of the most melodramatic facial expressions I've ever seen at one point) and Cattrall is wasted until the final act, when she's given a multi-episode plotline to resolve in the last fifteen minutes.

There have been dozens of great shows spread thin by their transition to the big screen, but few have fallen quite so far as Sex and the City. What worked about the series was the mixing of believable characters with "can you believe she just said/did that?" situations. That shock value is gone. The believability is gone. Even the laughs are gone, to be replaced by a gaudy sense of commercialism (I’ve never seen more product placement) and materialism. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and the recession we find ourselves in that it’s a lot harder to get excited about thousands of dollars being spent at auction on tacky jewelry or an endless stream of over-priced outfits. Seeing it all larger-than-life on the big screen actually left a bad taste in my mouth and made me physically uncomfortable in the first hour. With what worked about the show completely stripped away, all we're left with is a movie that reminds us how good its source material once was and serves as a warning to anyone considering bringing a series to the big screen. Are you listening David Chase?

Rating: ONE BONE

Release Date: May 30th, 2008

Rating: R

Starring: Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Jennifer Hudson, Steve Eigenberg, and Chris Noth

Director: Michael Patrick King

Writer: Michael Patrick King