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At its best, the television series Sex and the City was funny and outrageous. It celebrated a glossy vision of the good life in Manhat-tan, based on shopping, sex, fashion and female solidarity. It was Friends with frocks and orgasms. Now comes Sex and the City the film, and everything great about the series has been lost in transition. The fizz has gone, the fun looks fake and the laughs are few.

Steven Spielberg knew that to bring back Indiana Jones successfully, he had to give his audience more of the same. The writer and director of Sex and the City, Michael Patrick King, has made the mistake of trying to do something different. He knows his girls are too old now to act like carefree twentysomethings. So this is the story of what happened next to Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and the girls when they passed 40.

Carrie’s life looks like a fairy tale. She finally has not only the man of her dreams – Mr Big (Chris Noth), whom she is set to marry – but the apartment of her dreams. But wait, she’s even got the wardrobe of her dreams for storing all the designer labels of her dreams. Meanwhile, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is blissfully married, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is juggling motherhood and career, while sex-mad Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is juggling a very different set of balls out in Hollywood with her hunk (Jason Lewis).

The television series was about women looking for love. What we have here is a drama about what happens when you finally find it. Can the romance – and the sex – survive domesticity? Is there such a thing as a happy ending? And why am I starting to write like Carrie Bradshaw?

After a bright and breezy opening, the film goes into a very long, mopy and moody middle section. It should have been short and snappy, but it’s like a very long soap opera about a group of middle-aged people and their relationship problems. Even a talented actress such as Cynthia Nixon can’t make trite material like this come alive. As for Sarah Jessica Parker, I simply don’t understand her appeal. Is it a gay thing? A girl thing?

Sex and the City fans don’t want all this grown-up domestic angst. They want the girls getting sloshed, out on the pull and going shopping. And every so often, the film tries to recapture the good old days. The girls shriek with excitement whenever Samantha turns up – and end up sounding ridiculous. They lunch. They drink. They hug. And they shop and drool over designer labels. But nothing can hide the fact that they are mutton dressed in Prada.

The film knows fans will expect fashion, and whole sequences have been created for no other purpose than to allow Carrie to show off her wardrobe. We even get her showing off the wardrobe she used to wear in the TV series, including that silly tutu number from the opening credits. (How did the worst-dressed woman in the history of television ever become a fashion icon?) And just in case there wasn’t enough of the stuff, we get models showing more fashion when Carrie and the girls turn up for New York fashion week.

All these frocks can’t conceal the fact that what’s missing is the outrageousness of old. With the television series, you had a sense of hearing what modern women were actually thinking. But in the film they sit around and ask dull questions, such as: How often do you have sex? The film takes no thematic or dramatic risks. Perhaps it should have been called Safe Sex and the City.

What I miss are the laughs. Carrie and her crowd were never going to be the successors to Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin set, but Samantha had a quick wit that was a pleasure to hear. But here she’s a pale imitation of her former self. And the fact that the script has to rely on having Charlotte poo in her pants to get a laugh shows how times have changed.

To the film’s credit, it has for the first time dared to suggest that these women are incredibly self-centred and that their emotional needs and hunger for status are actually destructive to their relationships with men. But the script really wants to have it both ways.

It’s mostly an unabashed you-can-have-it-all celebration of conspicuous consumption. (There’s a moment when Carrie gives her black PA a Louis Vuitton bag, and the strings start up and you’re meant to have a lump in your throat.) Then, right at the end, it tries to suggest there’s more to life than the way you look. Too little, far too late.

15, 145 mins

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