If I were not, like everybody in possession of a television for the past ten years, familiar with the show, I would have assumed that this film was a parody of the materialistic and promiscuous wealthy elite of Manhattan. The lives of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, at one time considered the four 'types' of modern woman ('Are you a Carrie or a Miranda?' a million women's lifestyle magazines demanded) are awash in a sea of vulgar excess, the likes of which are usually reserved for VH1's The Fabulous Life of...

SATC is potentially the least subtle film I've ever seen: the camera swoops gratuitously to the fabulous shoes beneath the desk or pounding the sidewalk, we are subjected to two separate montages of Carrie looking utterly fabulous - at one point reeling off a list of designers in a voice so faux-orgasmic it was actually uncomfortable; the solemn strains of a string quartet accompany the giving of a Louis Vuitton bag from one gal to another as though she had just pledged a kidney to ensure the other's survival.

Of course, hyperbole and excess are not necessarily anathema to a great film. The problem is that Sex and The City isn't brilliantly over-the-top a la The Breakfast Club, or comically over-the-top like Shoot 'Em Up. It takes itself entirely seriously, with barely a hint of self-consciousness. This goes double for the ladies themselves, whose predominant characteristics are overworked to the point of caricature. Kim Catrall's Samantha appears as a leering, lip-licking old letch rather than a sexy and confident fifty year-old career woman; Kirsten Davis' Charlotte, the quintessential uptight Jewish née WASP-ish Princess, is unsympathetic, possibly racist and prone to superfluous facial contortions.

Then there is Carrie, everywoman Carrie, who was so recognisable and sweet in the show. Her discomfort was our discomfort, her failures were felt by us all. Sarah Jessica Parker was just that good. Here however, she is difficult to relate to, which is an essential aspect of the rom-com genre. Like the folk tales of feudal times, rom-coms are supposed to offer us points of identification, providing a model of the universal problems of womankind with which to work through our own particular problems. But for the many of us who have never battled with the particular problem of whether to go for understated vintage or Vivienne Westwood wedding couture, or whether to let our obscenely rich boyfriends pay for the penthouse, there is little in Carrie to make us feel good. She is also nauseatingly cute and, after forty, playing cute is anything but.

The saddest thing about this film is that the show's creators took such care in wrapping up the final series perfectly only to have it ruined on the big screen. Carrie and Big were together forever, we naively supposed, resulting in one of those rare moments of television history wherein the audience collectively sat back contented . Making this film was the equivalent of wrenching open an oyster's mouth, shoving the pearl back in, and casting it far, far out to sea.

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