Well, it'll do the trick. Despite being overstuffed and, at times, sleep-all-day-every-day depressing, it delivers our ladies, punning, drinking, laughing, talking dirty, and taking care of one another in fabulous get-ups, and that's pretty much enough.

For anyone who hasn't seen the trailer, which revealed all of the most important plot points months ago, three years have passed, but not that much has changed since the finale. Carrie and Big are still together, living in non-wedded bliss in their respective apartments. It's the decision to get married that sends the plot into motion: Carrie, who originally attempts to keep the whole shindig small, goes wedding-gaga after appearing in bridal couture for a Vogue cover shoot (the label porn in the movie far surpasses anything that ever appeared on the show, which is saying something. At some point, Carrie intones the names of designers like Lanvin, Dior, and Vivienne Westwood as though it were an incantation. She's become more devout with age). She wants a huge all-white affair—Big, not so much.

Miranda is still in exile in Brooklyn, and so pissed about it she's shrew-ing up her marriage. I'm not a Brooklyn apologist, but holy shit, it's not a fucking penal colony. Three years of brownstone living has never made anyone this bitter. Miranda, who began the series as the friend with sense, has become frigid and uptight. (Once Carrie's most special pal, she's been passed over for bridesmaid duties in favor of the incorrigible Samantha, who is obviously a million times more fun).

Meanwhile, Charlotte, who began the series as the uptight friend—the one only really lame girls with a thing for pearls and marrying for money liked best— has loosened up in the best ways. She's the only member of the fearsome foursome to have had her fairy tale come true —happily married, with children, on the Upper East Side—and it suits her. She flits through the film, a counterweight to all the sadness, as Carrie's most reliable and committed protector, and provides the biggest laugh of the film, in a gross-out physical comedy set piece.

Except for the fact that she lives in Los Angeles, Samantha hasn't really changed at all. Thank god.

As for the much-spoilered death, there isn't one, but as Carrie says "There might as well be." The middle section of the film follows Carrie into a deep, semi-catatonic depression: it feels realistic and, then, when the film delivers its necessary, predictable happy ending, also totally manipulative.

There's something sort of bogus about the whole idea of the Sex and The City movie: It can never be more than an epilogue. The series finale, which aired on HBO four years ago, left the girls in exactly the states they were supposed to be in, with the men they were supposed to be with. If the movie were to upend those endings, it would feel like a betrayal, a sucker punch ("You're trying to tell me Carrie and Big don't walk into the sunset after all?!?!"), a device to mess with the ladies' personal lives for the duration of the film and then deposit them in much the same place they were at the start. So why'd they have to make Carrie cry so hard?

The film ends at Samantha's 50th birthday party, with the four friends toasting to 50 more years. SATC is single-handedly making us pay attention to the emotional (and sexual) lives of middle-aged women: with all the carping about its frivolity and skewed values taken into account, who else is doing that? One suspects, if the movie is a hit (and, duh, it will be), we'll all be celebrating Sam's 60th birthday in similar fashion, at Sex And The City: The Movie, Part 4.