Look, we all know that the cosmo-swilling cougar crowd and the younger women who -- for reasons I'll never fully understand -- aspire to be a part of that one day, will make Sex and the City 2: The Sands of Time a massive success at the box office this weekend. That's the bad news. The good news is that, believe it or not, the movie is apparently so indefensibly bad that it may eventually be known as the singular event that drove a much-needed stake through the heart of these kinds of films -- the female fantasy rom-coms that I've ridiculed ad nauseam around here over the past few years -- and ended their reign of terror in Hollywood. Given that Sex and the City really does stand as the Fairy Godmother (or is it bitchy, Crawford-esque Step Mother?) of this entire genre, if even it sucks harder than Samantha trying to convince herself she's still 25, what hope do those other Carrie-come-lately movies have?
For those of you who will be lucky/smart enough to never suffer through Sex and the City 2, the Huffington Post has compiled some of the best lines from some of the worst reviews for it.
And keep in mind, as of Friday, this movie had a Rotten Tomatoes ranking of just 8%.
"This film is an epic eyesore. It's as if they set out to make a movie that said, 'You're right! We are hideous!'"
-- David Edelstein, New York magazine
"The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense... Your watch will tell you that a shade less than two and a half hours have elapsed, but you may be shocked at just how much older you feel when the whole thing is over."
-- AO Scott, The New York Times
"The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they've been playing these roles so long they've grown moss."
-- Rex Reed, The New York Observer
"As tasteless as an Arabian cathouse, as worn-out as your 1998 flip-flops and as hideous as the mom jeans Carrie wears with a belly-baring gingham top, 'Sex and the City 2' is two of the worst movies of the year... Despite its 'Lawrence of Arabia' length, this film -- the Sexless and the Self-Pitying -- is as unfunny and shapeless as another famed desert epic. Just think of it as 'Bitchtar.'"
-- Kyle Smith, The New York Post
"The movie's visual style is arthritic. Director Michael Patrick King covers the sitcom dialogue by dutifully cutting back and forth to whoever is speaking... Carrie narrates the film, providing useful guidelines for those challenged by its intricacies. Sample: 'Later that day, Big and I arrived home.'"
-- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times
"Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles."
-- Cliff Doerksen, The Chicago Reader
"I sensed a claustrophobic panic growing at the screening I attended. Like Martin Sheen waking from his uneasy slumber in Apocalypse Now and thinking: 'Shit, I'm still in Saigon,' various members of the audience would emerge from their periodic reveries and mumble out loud: 'Shit, Carrie and her friends and by that token, we the audience, are still in Abu Dhabi.'"
-- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian UK
"What might I have done wrong, in a past life or in this one, that I deserve to have my eyeballs seared by Sarah Jessica Parker's loony desert-princess getups? ... To gaze upon a couple of amazingly well-groomed camels and realize that they have better hairdos than the human movie stars astride them?"
-- Stephanie Zacharek, (who now inexplicably writes for moveline.com)
"It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the 'Saw' franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks. Instead of that, we get something that's truly sadistic: the SATC girls as haggard specters, haunted by their freewheeling '90s past and stupefied by the demands of work, marriage and/or motherhood. This bloated, incoherent movie mimics an SATC episode in structure -- vague social relevance at the beginning and the end, conspicuous consumption in the middle -- with virtually none of the wit or panache, and seems devoted to destroying our affection for these characters."
-- Andrew O'Hehir, in the one review you have to read start-to-finish in Salon.com
And my personal favorite:
"If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night."
-- Lindy West, Salon.com
