Audiences won’t get `Carrie’d away

Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) and Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) reunited once more for a full two and a half hours of love – and a-less-than-fabulous plot.

For newcomers to HBO’s Sex and the City, the opening montage of flashbacks and character updates brings everyone up to speed and the ladies’ lives appear to have finally come together. Miranda and Steve Brady are married and living in Brooklyn with their son, Charlotte and husband Harry Goldenblatt are blissful in the city with their adopted Chinese daughter, Samantha is living in Los Angeles with her client and boyfriend Smith Jared and Carrie is searching for apartments to share with the marriage-fearing Mr. Big – finally introduced by his real name, John James Preston.

Most of the women are known for their distinctive personalities: Miranda’s the cynic, Charlotte’s the believer and Samantha’s the – to put it nicely – lover. Carrie, however, is difficult to place, which is why Parker has difficulty readjusting to the mannerisms and personality of her character after a four-year hiatus from the show.

Now that Carrie is no longer writing her weekly column and has produced three best-sellers, her narration of the girls’ sexcapades is no longer necessary, but leaves more silence than Sex fans are used to.

After six seasons of breakups and countless boyfriend troubles, having all the girls on the same track toward a happy life was almost too good to be true – especially with two hours left in the movie. However, when their seemingly perfect lives quickly began to unravel, an audience of devoted fans turned on the waterworks.

Besides its tendency to pull on heartstrings, the movie captures the frank and humorous style of the series with scenes that still manage to shock jaded and desensitized audiences.

In this time of economic crisis and debt, it’s difficult to tell if the tears shed by audience members throughout the film were related to the shaky love lives of the characters or to the forced viewing of a two-hour parade of wealth and excessive shopping. The women’s almost unattainable lifestyles, however, did not stop average viewers from packing into theaters. While the women’s daily affairs may be over-the-top, the movie leaves little time to criticize their spending habits when it bombards viewers with more than 80 costume changes from designers such as Dolce & Gabbana and Vera Wang.

While die-hard fans of the show may leave theaters satisfied at best, they should not expect the same fulfillment as that garnered from six years of award-winning episodes. A few words of advice: Ignore the hype.