I was never not going to go and see the second Sex and the City film, although I had my reservations almost as soon as I heard it was being made. I was a huge fan of the TV series and I also really enjoyed the first film which I found entertaining, touching and extremely heartwarming. I forgave it its excessive cheesiness and its obsession with money, materialism and Manolo Blahnik because it made me laugh, it was entertaining and I actually thought the story at its heart was a good one.

The reason I was dubious about a second film was that every loose end left lying seemed to be tied up well and tightly the last time. Carrie and Big finally married; Miranda and Steve resolved their fidelity problems; Charlotte’s fertility woes disappeared and Samantha and Smith parted ways in an ultra-civilised manner, she returning to her sassy, single self and he, well, disappearing into the ether of ex-boyfriend-dom, presumably never to be mentioned again. And that seemed to be that. So when I heard there was a sequel in the making I was instantly wary: where could the story could go next without dismantling that nicely wrapped up parcel?

Well, to Abu Dhabi it seems.  But before we get into that, let’s catch up with the “fabulous” (I can’t take the word ‘fabulous’ seriously anymore, sorry) foursome.  What have they been doing since we left them two years ago, toasting cosmopolitans to Samantha as she turned 50?  Well, Carrie Preston-but-still-sometimes-Bradshaw (not sure what’s going on there) has been married to John, a.k.a Mr Big (I want to refer to him as ‘The Artist, formerly known as Prince” for some reason), for two years, and seems to have spent most of that time lavishing money on their ultra-sleek new apartment while continuously berating him for sometimes wanting to watch television and put his feet up on the couch (she somehow didn’t know this about him before she married him, of course). Gone, sadly, are the days of Carrie’s cramped but charming rent-controlled apartment with its bulging wardrobe and its two bathroom doors. Gone too, seem to be the days of her happy-go-lucky disposition and her cute one-liners. Carrie is no fun in 2010. She moans a lot and she seems to have abandoned every personality trait that once made her so endearing. “Is this because I’m a bitch wife who nags you?”, she wails at Big. Well yes, Carrie, yes it bloody well is!

Samantha meanwhile, is menopausal. But rather than embrace it, flaunt it and somehow make it sexy in the way I would have expected her to, we find that she’s knocking back 50 pills every morning to try and trick her body into thinking itself younger. Uh, WHAT? What the hell happened to the woman who was more than happy with her body, and her life?  And what kind of message does that send to the rest of us?  Samantha is now more obsessed with herself than she ever was before, and her chronic insecurity about the prospect of growing older seemed to combine with her obscene vanity to make her appear as little more than really rather pathetic. What I used to love about Samantha was that she was confident, secure within herself and fiercely, ferociously independent. But her vapid obsession with reigniting her youth has kissed a fond goodbye to all of that. She’s not funny anymore. She’s tragic.

And Charlotte. Charlotte ‘I-can’t-cope-even-though-I-have-no-financial-worries-whatsoever-and-mountains-of-paid-help’ York-Goldenblatt. My God was she annoying in this film. In case anyone has forgotten, it was Charlotte who spent the entire six series of the TV show lusting after her Disney-based fantasy of marrying Prince Charming, having his adorable children and giving up work to stay at home and bake cookies all day. And this all happened in the end when Harry (who somewhat weirdly manages to be an ass-kicking, hard-as-nails lawyer by day, yet a drooling, docile puppy-type by night) and their two children turned up. So you’d be forgiven for feeling surprised when it’s revealed that, despite having everything she ever wanted and then some, poor old Charlotte still isn’t happy. Because now she’s started fretting about Harry’s fidelity. Is he having it off with the gorgeous, bra-less, twenty-something Nanny? Are sparks flying while Nanny and Harry bathe Charlotte‘s children while Charlotte herself preens remorselessly infront of the mirror while draping herself in vintage Dior?  Well no, they’re not. The Nanny is a lesbian, naturally. But if she wasn’t, oh Charlotte, you’d  in big trouble. Because despite never having put a single foot wrong, Harry must be a cheater at heart, right?  He is a man after all, heaven forbid.  Dangle a young woman with a decent cupsize infront of him and off he’ll go into the sunset, wife and children duly abandoned.  Is it just me or does anyone else smell a sexist cliché?

Miranda seemed to be the only one of the four who I didn’t want to grab by the hair approximately once every two minutes throughout the whole film. While time seems to have mellowed her sarcastic rejoinders a touch, her ball-busting personality is still very much there, and I was thankful for that.  The only thing that disappointed me is that Miranda doesn’t get much of a storyline. The perma-dramas of the other three (TV-watching husband, advancing age and bra-less nanny in case you’d forgotton) seem to have put well and truly paid to that, which is a shame, given that she was by far and away the least annoying character in the entire movie.

So after we are treated to the most painstakingly circus-like wedding there’s ever been (of Stanford and Anthony – wait a minute, don’t they hate each other?), which includes Liza Minnelli performing a rendition of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies that I would only ever have expected to see in a nightmare, the four girls are whisked off to Abu Dhabi on the back of some PR gig Samantha is involved in.  It’s a tenuous excuse for several hundred thousand shots of the four walking in a horizontal line (why do they insist on doing that?) across the Arabian desert, clothed head to toe in designer togs.  The entire movie is tenuous (or is that tedious?) though, so we’ll just have to get over it.

It wasn’t even the ridiculousness of the hotel, nor the fact that each girl had her own driver, her own manservant and her own cubic metre of deep-conditioned, vanilla-scented, rose petal-scattered air in which to breathe that annoyed me the most (although those things did annoy me A LOT).  It was the fact that they seemed so blatantly ignorant of everything that wasn’t shoes, or clothes, or sex-related.  Have these women really managed to get to their forties (their fifties, even!) without forming a more concrete impression of the Middle East than one based solely on Disney’s Aladdin?  Have they really been that shockingly self-absorbed for such a lengthy period of time?  Don’t they ever watch the news?  Or read a book?  Or feel embarrassingly ignorant at dinner parties and thus resolve to actually learn stuff?  I could not get over the fact that these supposedly independent, opinionated, sassy, sexy women were so completely and unutterably dumb when it came to anything other than one of their two specialist subjects: sex and whining.  The message that sends to millions of women worldwide!  ‘Oh it’s OK to know nothing about other cultures and foreign affairs ladies!  As long as you can walk in high heels and you give good head you’ll be absolutely FINE!’.

And the ignorance was so pervasive that it tarnished the entire film.  They came across as a bunch of completely vacuous airheads for the entire two and half hours.  And disrespectful as well.  Samantha flaunting her bare body left, right and centre, having sex on the beach and waving her condom collection around in the marketplace for all to see. Carrie leaving money for her poor Indian servant to fly home to see his wife after he makes her some warm milk.  All four girls being so completely overwhelmed by the idea of covering themselves up in public that they essentially make spectacles of themselves time and time again.  I couldn’t stand it.  And then there was the Aidan thing. WOW, these poor, unfortunate women can’t even fly halfway across the world without some huge, ground-shaking volcano of a drama involving an ex-lover erupting unto one of them can they?  Someone get these poor, war-torn shoe addicts a cold flannel and a foot massage, they really do have a tough time of it.

The whole ignorance thing wasn’t just frustrating – it implied a nasty, arrogant superiority as well.  The girls seemed to think that anything un-American a) was wrong and b) should be changed.  The worst scene in the entire film for me came when a group of burka-clad muslim women revealed themselves to be Luis Vuitton-devotees JUST like Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte (‘hurrah we’re all the same, that religion thing, it’s just an act really’).  It made such a complete mockery of Middle Eastern culture and thought that I almost had to get up and leave.

Now you might think I’m just one of those SATC haters who will use any excuse to give the show a good old bashing.  But I’m not.  I really wanted this film to be a success, and to prove every single sequel sceptic out there (including myself) wrong.  I absolutely loved Sex and the City as a TV show, AND a first movie, and I defended it time and time again to its detractors in the face of many a barrage of criticism.  I brushed off its vanity, the fact that it can at times be little more than an advert for clothing designers and also the fact that it sends a whole host of really quite crap messages to women (and men) across the globe on average fifty times an hour.  I used to think that it was just entertainment, and if you were wise enough not to actually believe that you could be Carrie Bradshaw, then you could take it for what it’s meant to be, and just have fun with it.  But this second film took every one of those negatives far too far, at the expense of all of the show’s many positive attributes.  Blatant disregard for the rest of the world, a host of ignorant, self-absorbed characters and a sinister underlying tone of Western imperialism combined to make me feel ashamed to be in the cinema watching it.  It genuinely worries me that scores of young girls and women around the world lap this rubbish up and walk home from the cinema thinking “I want to be that”.  Sex and the City will never be the same for me again, and I really, genuinely wish I’d never seen this film.  My many happy memories of a great TV show are forever tainted because of a desire on the part of those involved to flog the SATC cash cow into the ground.  If you are still planning on seeing it, make sure you take a stiff gin with you to the cinema.  And have it to hand throughout.