My pal Zorca sifted through the reviews of Sex and the City 2 on Rotten Tomatoes, where the movie has achieved a majestic 16% approval rating. “The best thing about a movie this bad is the schadenfreude it affords,” Zorca says, and indeed, the cinematic putridness seems to have driven critics to awesome new levels of literary evisceration. Zorca culled the following zingers from the pack:

This is by far the lamest Grumpy Old Men sequel yet.

Two camels substitute for Fonzie’s shark in this franchise-ending sequel.

When Marie Antoinette did this, the people tore down the f’ing Bastille.

This may be this first time since “Lucky Lady” that I walked away from a film thinking that it needed more Liza.

Future Bolsheviks will use Sex and the City 2 as a recruiting film.

Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.

Makes The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert look like The Remains of the Day.

This is the new torture porn.

Shame on the writers of this soulless drivel for trying to pass this Canal Street bootleg sow’s ear off as a genuine Alexander McQueen silk purse.

The stakes are so low that, during the girls’ final madcap sprint through an outdoor market disguised in burqas, the unspeakable outcome they’re trying to forestall is the possibility of having to fly home in coach.

Twelve years, one beloved HBO series, and two feature films on, the Sex and the City gals have been reduced to Bratz dolls for grown women.

Although the movie repeatedly gives glossed lip service to feminism, it actually gives detractors who said the series perpetrated shallow female stereotypes a huge, glittery, indefensible target.

The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film.

That last one encapsulates my problem (based only on the marketing, reviews and word of mouth) with SATC2. The heart of the TV show was the genuineness of the women’s friendship. The moments I remember are the ones in which someone let down her guard and her friends weren’t afraid of the emotion: Miranda dealing with her mom’s death, Charlotte being comforted about her infertility, Carrie’s gazillion vulnerable moments. (Samantha was always the comic relief  — she was the least genuine, at least until her battle with cancer.) But  in SATC2, it seems that ALL the characters are now Samanthas — all quips, all jaded silky delivery, no nuance. And it’s ALL about the clothes. In the TV show, the clothes and shoes were fun, but they weren’t why I watched. Ditto the men. I loathed Big, and always felt that Carrie was a girlfriend I’d like to shake some sense into. That’s largely why I didn’t see the first movie either — hello, I don’t have three hours to spare, especially not if That Douche Guy is so central to the plot. No, I was in it for the sisterhood. But now none of those women seems real enough to care about, let alone want to have a heart-to-heart with about choosing dumbass men. Finally, the girls’ New York was at least recognizably my New York — a little shinier, but still mine. The more fabulous and exotic their lives get, the less escapist their world is. The filmmakers got it exactly wrong, and in such a cynical way. Now the characters I once loved have become the shallow, annoying, not-as-funny-as-they-think-they-are shrieking hordes tottering around the new Bowery.