SEX AND THE CITY (244 minutes)

 

(Opens wide today: five stars out of five).

 

 

When we last saw the girls at the conclusion of their popular HBO television series, they lay dead or dying in pools of blood in a lower Manhattan warehouse, victims of an horrific ambush ordered by Lu Duc Nguyen, their contact with the Vietnamese heroin triad that regularly brought 2,000 kilos of Saigon Sweet Sugar through the Port Authority every month.

 

Four years later, the movie begins with our heroin heroine Carrie (Sarah Michelle Geller) waking up in a South American hospital bed where her face has been surgically altered to resemble a greyhound.  She is on the run from Nguyen and her former best friend Samantha (Betty White), who flipped on Carrie and now operates her own drug cell in southeastern Laos.

 

But Carrie's not alone.  Her on-again, off-again sweetheart Mr. Big (Rob Schneider) has abandoned his New York real estate empire and now runs a Brazilian internet company called "Two Bigs, One Cup" specializing in fetish porn.  After a steamy 43 minute hot shower together, they kill a masked sodomite slave in a basement dungeon and steal his motorcycle for the 16 day drive from Rio to New York City.

 

Carrie and Big's encounters along the Pan American Highway do take up most of the film and there's a rather dull one hour segement in San Antonio where they search for Big's bicycle in the Alamo's basement.

 

Meanwhile Miranda and Berger (Pat Nixon, Fred Thompson) are fighting over the fact that she's a MENSA-level lawyer and he sells Jamaican flags at a corner gas station lot.  One fact that will confuse fans of the TV show is that the HBO series ended with Miranda's decapitated head held by its hair in the hands of a laughing Samoan assassin.  This isn't the only continuity mistake in the movie. 

 

I'm not giving anything away by telling you that both die when it is discovered their adopted Chinese baby is actually 93% lead and they are slowly poisoned.

 

Our giddy friend Charlotte (Lauren Bacall) comes to Carrie's aid at a key point in the movie when her art gallery, which is really an Al Qaeda safehouse, becomes possessed with the unrested spirits of the Native Americans buried underneath centuries ago.  New York Mayor George Spiderman (Craig T. Nelson) has a chilling line when he notes: "you didn't move the bodies, you built ON TOP OF THEM!".

 

Many minor characters return included sassy maid Magda (the late Harvey Korman, his last film role).  Carrie's gay friend Harvey (Tom Cruise) appears in a television commercial for WorldVision crisis relief while Samantha's hardbodied boyfriend Smith (Jon Lovitz) is seen mostly on the toilet.

 

Directed, written, photographed, costumed and even catered by gay men, Sex And The City still has an amazingly heterosexual teenaged sense of wonder.  Point of fact: who knew that Carrie's thousands of shoes were actually aliens from a technocratic planet who only "transformed" into shoes to present themselves as something humans would recognize, as they lay silent in the closet waiting to dominate the earth and devour it of its precious natural resources?

 

The film ends on Big's luxury yacht in the Sarragosa sea where all four girls, their boy toys and the much-missed comedy team of Kid 'N Play chase each other from deck to deck to the jazzy Benny Hill theme "Yakety Sax".  Only the shot of the dog at the end with its eyes narrowed hints that a Sex And The City sequel is not only a dream: it's a must!