Sex and the City 2 is a terrible movie. I watched the TV show and the first film and loved every silly, affectionate, over-the-top minute.

But I walked out of this second movie feeling like my best friend had joined a cult.

Betrayed. Confused. Hurt. All the emotions that come from seeing your favourite characters trapped in a shrieky funhouse of artifice and alarming fashion.

I took my pal, Dr. Moira McQueen, along for the ride. Moira is a class act, a fifty-something Scottish lady who teaches sexuality and marriage at St. Michael's College school of theology in Toronto.

Moira met her husband in undergraduate school in Glasgow. They waited to marry for three years (and no, they didn't, as she is quick to say).

While they were engaged, they mulled over the Catholic church's 1968 position paper on birth control, which said any barrier between a man and woman during sex was a no-no.

Moira and her husband married, and had seven children in 10 years. "We practised natural family planning," she says.

Time to grow up

Moira gasped and shook her head often through Sex and the City 2. Not at the sexy bits. "You don't teach sexuality for 20 years and get shocked at that," she said, gesturing at Samantha humping a guy with a seriously flat tummy.

Sex and the City actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis in Tokyo on June 1, 2010 for the Japanese premiere. (Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press)

No, she was cringing at the mortifyingly bad humour. When Samantha sets her eyes on a potential conquest in Abu Dhabi, she calls him "Lawrence of my labia."

Moira snorted. "It's a bit tacky, isn't it?"

When the movie was over, we chatted about sex and morality. She knows I'm interested in exploring the subject.

But the movie was so thin that we didn't have much to chew on. And anyway, the big story about the movie is not the sex, which is dumb and embarrassing and doesn't feel shocking the way it used to on the TV show.

The big story is that whoever made the film missed the mark in a pretty staggering way.

All those people who, like me, were fixated on the show during its six-year run, are adults now. If only the creators had let the characters grow up, too.

Goodbye to all that

I remember the first time I saw Sex and the City. I had just moved home to Toronto from college and every Thursday night my roommate would invite five friends over and they'd gather around the TV and watch what Carrie and Samantha and Charlotte and Miranda were up to.

They'd drink fruity martinis and laugh and then they'd stay up for an hour after the show, drinking and talking about their lives.

I'd often go to bed, but their voices would carry and I would fall asleep to the sound of their laughter.

I watched the show again years later and realized that sex was the red herring. The show was about friendship, and that's why it resonated with viewers who weren't always getting it on and who couldn't afford Carrie's scary outfits.

The men were the side dishes: every fling deepened our understanding of the central female characters' needs and desires.

But it was a fantasy, and I think we all wanted it to end. When Samantha hit her forties and was still running after waiters, we wanted her to settle down. Enough of this feminist mumbo-jumbo about sexual independence.

Samantha began to seem a slave to her sexual compulsions, about as free as a prisoner in Abu Ghraib.

We all wanted Carrie to stop being so relentlessly narcissistic and self-destructive. But no, she kept chasing the insufferable Big and buying shoes she couldn't afford.

In Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion writes about the moment she realized that her enchanted time in New York was over, that it was the moment to move on.

It's really about the end of youth, she said.

"That was the year, my 28th, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."

In the end, she understood that "it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair."

Know that moment

For anyone who grew up alongside this show, we all had that moment. The moment we realized life had to be more than studio apartments and shoes and unsubstantial boyfriends.

The moment you realize that all your petty and ridiculous behaviour, which was amusing when you were in your teens and 20s, would ruin you as time went on.

So we grew up. But Samantha, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte, didn't.

Imagine a Sex and the City 2 where the ladies told the truth. Where Samantha admitted that 30 years of stranger bopping has left her cold.

Where Charlotte admitted that she was a bit ashamed by how shallow she was (who wears vintage when they're baking muffins?). Where Carrie talked about how she really felt about not having kids.

The best moments on the show were those involving real soul searching. I don't know about you, but at the end of the episodes, when Carrie would curl up with her laptop and type out her little pensées, I was moved, dammit.

The movie's a bust because it doesn't let the air in and it is a letdown for the fans who have been watching and loving the show from its beginnings.

We all know it can't last. We could have handled the truth.