The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is more tolerable
than The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants the first. I
attribute this slight improvement to the following factors: The four
protagonists—wispy, romantic Lena (Alexis Bledel); pragmatic
Latina Carmen (America Ferrera); blond, athletic daughter-of-a-suicide
Bridget (Blake Lively); and Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), who’s sort of
goth—are older now, and they no longer feel comfortable chanting
solemn oaths while huddled around a pair of magical Levi’s. Thank god.
Also, director Sanaa Hamri is a woman, unlike Pants 1 director
Ken Kwapis, and the girl-bonding scenes feel much less forced.
But the plot of this movie remains a fantasy whipped up for the sole
and express pleasure of 16-year-old girls. If the audible weeping and
gasps of the preview audience I watched it with are any indication, the
filmmakers have their demographic down. Each of our young heroines has,
as the movie begins, been admitted into the higher education
institution of her dreams: Lena is fiddling with pastels at RISD,
Carmen is treading the boards at the Yale School of Drama, Bridget is
playing soccer for Brown, and Tibby is getting all urban at NYU.
Whenever they encounter naked boys (often), the boys are obscenely
ripped. Happy developments tumble forth in nearly every scene: A
restless stage manager is tapped to act, a married ex-boyfriend gets
his loveless union annulled, and a female mentor is procured from a
Turkish archaeological dig. The barrage of wish fulfillment gets
quickly absurd.
There is, however, one exception to the screenplay’s relentless
optimism. Tibby has a massive pregnancy scare when her boyfriend’s
expired condom breaks—but how is it that Tibby, living in
Greenwich Village, has never heard of emergency contraception? It’s a
gaping plot hole, and a major missed opportunity.
