I feel I should add a disclaimer before anything else I say: I haven’t yet seen “Sex and the City 2”, so my opinions on it are utterly invalid. However, if the trailer and posters are anything to go by, it’s likely to be as much of a crushing disappointment as the last.

Early seasons of the original series were brilliant. The writing was impressive, and every episode was entertaining, witty and occasionally thought-provoking. Instead of being the cartoonish virgins and whores who have crossed the path of many a male protagonist throughout the history of film and television, these women were complex central-characters with their own histories and inner lives. The relationship between these four friends was the main focus of the narrative, set against a background of the contrasting glamour and squalor of urban life.

Yet somehow, it lost its way. From beginning as a story about independent and sexually assertive women navigating modern love, it developed into something vapid and distasteful. It wasn’t a sudden transformation. Things degraded over several seasons. Slowly, all our main characters narrowed their ambitions to the accumulation of shoes and trinkets and the pursuit of a rich man to complete their lives.

Women everywhere were quietly being let down. When did we realise that something had gone wrong with our heroines? Perceptive analysis of human interaction and the depiction of liberated female sexuality had been eroded away and replaced by a showcase for haute couture and handbags. It became an advert. This relentless celebration of consumerism was occasionally interspersed with snippets of lazy innuendo from characters we no longer recognised. Well-written women had been reduced to dull stereotypes: Carrie became a neurotic clotheshorse, merely a device for the will-they-or-won’t-they storyline with Mr Big; Miranda morphed into an uptight workaholic; Charlotte, a prissy 1950s prude; Samantha, an ageing slag whose sole topic of conversation was cock-size.

Many young women still see this as aspirational viewing, more out of tradition than anything else. The advertising industry now uses its imagery as a benchmark for attracting the female demographic. Nearly every product aimed at women includes the obligatory four-girlfriends-talking-candidly-at-a-table scene or the slow-motion-walk-along-the-pavement-in-floaty-dresses scene. Anything from rice cakes to laxatives is sold to us in this same format. Is this what female sexual independence has been reduced to?

Catherine Bray concludes her excellent review of “Sex and the City 2” thus:

“My GCSE History textbook had a chapter on women getting the vote which included a cartoon from Punch Magazine claiming to illustrate the difference between the male and female brain. The picture of the male brain was full of sections like ‘politics’, ‘finance’, ‘international affairs’ and ‘foxhunting’. The female brain was full of labels including ‘shoes’, ‘hats’ and ‘marriage’. Sex And The City 2 appears to largely agree with Punch’s assessment, though it would of course add ‘sex’ to this giddy cocktail. As Carrie might put it, I couldn’t help but wonder: could it really be that the main difference between an ancient cartoon arguing that the female of the species should not be allowed to vote and a 21st century film supposedly portraying empowered modern women was whether they were getting some or not?”

Read more of this review at Film4.