The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

Even though I have never seen the original Traveling Pants movie, I kind of had a good idea what to expect walking into The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. I expected there would be a lot of female bonding (accompanied by soft piano music), a lot of break ups (piano music), a lot of make ups (yes, more piano music), and "girl power" dialogue such as, "The only one who can diminish your potential is yourself". (The piano should get its own credit by now...) I got what I expected, and sadly, not a whole lot else. If the filmmakers really wanted to be honest, they would have titled this film "Chick Flick Screenwriting Class 101".

The title refers to four girls who are lifelong best friends who, despite going their separate ways in life, they share a common bond - a pair of jeans that somehow is able to be a perfect fit for all four of them. Each girl wears the jeans for a week, then mails it off to the next girl along with a letter of what is going on in their lives. I'm assuming they also wash the jeans once in a while, since they've apparently been doing this for three or four years now as the film starts. However, the movie never goes close to a laundromat. The first film covered their high school years. Now they're young adults and, much to the sadness of one of the girls, Carmen (America Ferrara), they're starting to drift apart as they go their own ways in life. Can the magic of the traveling pants keep them together? This is just one of the many tough questions this movie asks. I won't spoil the answer for you, but I will say that the last half hour of the film is driven by the crisis of the pants having gone missing.

Despite the fact that the girls are now in their 20s, their personalities and problems still seem rooted in teenage soap operas. The previously mentioned Carmen is a shy and kind of quiet girl who is constantly kept on the sidelines by one of her friends, a snobby blonde named Julia (Rachel Nichols), who we can immediately spot as being a stuck up witch from the second she walks on screen, but Carmen doesn't realize until much later, when she's ready to deliver that quote about "diminishing your potential". Carmen works backstage at a theater company in Vermont, where Julia is a star player. But then, a handsome young British actor named Ian (Tom Wisdom) takes a shine to her, and forces her to audition for the female lead in their production of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale". Carmen gets the role, while snobby Julia is stuck with a minor role. With Carmen getting not only the lead but all the attention from Ian, Julia sets about a devious scheme to bring her friend down, by pretending that Ian is in love with her instead, and badmouthing Carmen behind her back with the director and other actors. These are the kind of plots that used to fuel after school teen dramas on Nickeloden and MTV. Now they're carrying our summer movies.

The thing is, America Ferrara is quite likable as Carmen, and has a lot of personality in the role. It's just that the tired screenplay does her no favors. The same goes for the rest of the Sisterhood, which includes sporty Bridget (Blake Lively), sarcastic Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), and nice girl artist Lena (Alexis Bledel). They're fine actresses in their respective roles, and the characters that they play are quite likable. Bridget goes off to Turkey to participate in an archeological dig, but leaves early to reunite with her estranged grandmother (Blythe Danner) whom she hasn't seen in years, and helps Bridget comes to terms with the suicide death of her mother. Tibby has a brief scare when she thinks she might be pregnant after having sex with a guy she's been seeing for almost a year, and the condom breaks. Lena is going to art school, and finds herself torn between two guys - the nude model who poses for her in class whom she has struck up a relationship with, and an old flame from the original film who broke her heart, but has come back. Despite the performances and the characters being likable, their storylines and problems are so generic and straight-forward, it's really hard to care about anything that happens to them.

Part of the reason why the stories never quite connect emotionally is that the movie feels like it's constantly pulling us in different directions. The film glaringly jumps from one plotline to the next with very little rhyme or reason. It's almost as if director Sanaa Hamri had strict orders that no scene could be longer than two minutes in length. Just when we're starting to get drawn in a little, it suddenly jumps to a completely different story, and then just as rapidly jumps to the one after that. Of the four main plots, Carmen's is probably the one that the film spends the most amount of time with, so she comes across as the most fleshed out of the girls. The other members of the Sisterhood seem to get a bit shafted, especially Bridget. The movie spends very little time with her and her grandmother, so we never get a true sense of their connection, which is so key to her storyline. Her final scene with her father, which is supposed to be the emotional climax of her plot, is so brief it almost seems like an afterthought.

I am aware that I am not the intended audience for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, but I will openly admit to finding much to admire and even liking other movies that were obviously intended for women. Here, I found myself mainly ticking off the well-worn cliches in my head, and counting the minutes until that ever-present soft piano music would kick in on the score. Were it not for the likable lead performances, there would be nothing to recommend here. Even with the performances present, there's very little to excite or even engage to be found.

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