The female view on Sex and the City

In a recent round of the endlessly fascinating Which Sex and the City Character Are You? game, my friend and I agreed immediately that our gay best friend would be Samantha. "And you're obviously Carrie," she said. Because I clip-clop my way daintily through the big city, sip cocktails, and leave a trail of devastated and devastating men in my wake? "Nah, just because you're a journalist." Oh, OK. Well, I can but dream.

And that's the point of SATC, it's a fantasy. If we were ever in any doubt after six glorious series of the television show, the new film makes it abundantly, glossily, parodically clear. This is a world of front rows at New York fashion week, Manhattan penthouses and Louboutins on the beach. A world in which Samantha, asked how her 3,000-mile flight was, replies simply, "Fabulous!"; in which moving house is not a dusty old grind but a champagne-fuelled riot where everyone's wearing silk dresses and slash-front tops and clowning around in vintage couture; in which men actually have discussions about closet space rather than just rolling their eyes.

At the beginning, as the plinky-plonky theme tune is given an ill-advised hip-hop makeover, Carrie's trademark narration leads us to believe that the quartet has grown up since we last met them. Samantha is loved-up and monogamous with Smith in LA, for goodness' sake. And Carrie and Big (now known as John!) are house-hunting and reading love letters companionably to one another in bed. And they're getting married.

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But in two clicks of a Manolo heel, they're reverting to the brunching caricatures we know and love. Carrie's back in her ponytail and kooky stilettos, still keeping sweaters in her stove and obsessing over everything; Charlotte is still yawnsomely, perkily perfect; Miranda is still a sleep-deprived ball-breaker; and Samantha, well, she's still getting "wasabi in places you shouldn't ever get wasabi" – and all the best lines, too.

We're told at the beginning of the film that "twentysomething women come to New York in search of the two Ls – labels and love" (yes, the whole thing is a feminist nightmare, but you already knew that). And the film provides both in bagfuls, groaning with product placement for designer dresses, mobile phones and, bizarrely, sandwich chains, and drowning in syrupy sentiment. There's a lot less of the wit – and sex – that made the original so fresh and exciting. The film is also way too long, failing to sustain the energy of the first hour, which is a fan's paradise of memories, and fashion montages (Carrie's tutu from the original title sequence even pops up).

It certainly has its faults, from the superficial – Carrie looks like a witchy, old drag queen when she dyes her hair dark, and Samantha wears too much fur – to the serious. I seriously hated the ending. But this is not a real film, in the sense of Oscar-worthy performances or scriptwriters. It's just a big, blown-up, brash version of the show, like watching five of the soppier episodes back-to-back. But as anyone who has ever spent a day snuggled up on the sofa with a box set will know, that's no bad thing.