I haven’t seen Sex and the City 2 and don’t plan to, so I am not weighing in on the film itself. But its critical reception can best be described as uniformly venomous. For each movie, Metacritic.com assigns numeric scores to the reviews of America’s leading critics and averages them into a Metacritic score between 1 and 100. Generally, really outstanding movies score in the high 70s, and dreadful movies score in the low 30s. Sex and the City 2‘s Metacritic score is 28. As a comparison, the worst movies that I have seen this year are Tooth Fairy (Metacritic score of 36) and Leap Year (Metacritic score of 33). The worst movie that I saw last year was Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which scored a 39. So we can safely say that Sex and the City 2 is widely reviled and will show up on the Worst of the Year lists.
I keep Best of the Year lists but not Worst of the Year lists. Because I’m not a professional critic, I’m not required to see every movie. I try to avoid the bad ones. Because I repeatedly saw the trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans?, I skipped that one. The only reason that I have seen Tooth Fairy and Leap Year is because they were the only movies I hadn’t seen that were showing on very long airplane flights.
I love Metacritic because the critical consensus is generally closer to my taste than that of individual critics. Click here and check it out for yourself.