rated R

As a cultural phenomenon, “Sex and the City” is a puzzler. A glitzy, manufactured sort of feminism, “Sex” managed during its six-season run on HBO (1998 to 2004) to combine girl-power posturing and crass commercialism into frothy, fun escapism. For some of the ladies on “Sex,” size does matter, and assuming that bigger is better, the cast made the jump to the big screen, resulting in a designer knock-off of the original article—a convincing copy that has some telltale flaws.

The movie is essentially the show on Botox—bigger (bloated, really), brighter and more bombastic. The shoes are more expensive, the product placements more egregious (was that lingering shot of an iPhone really necessary?) and the names of designer labels are dropped with an even giddier abandon. For fans of the show, the transition of “Sex” to the big screen doesn’t entirely capture the snap and allure of the show, but it’s not a bad adaptation. For the uninitiated—well, if you haven’t drank the Carrie Kool-Aid yet, you’re unlikely to find the feature film palatable.

Picking up where the show left off, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is living happily ever after with Big (Chris Noth). After 10 years of on-again, off-again romance, they’re planning to move into a pricey 5th Avenue abode (“Real estate heaven,” Carrie calls it) and settle down. Carrie’s stalwart friends, Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) are all caught up in their own relationships, but Carrie’s sudden announcement that she and Big are planning to tie the knot brings the gang back together. Complications ensue, cosmos are consumed and there are tears a-plenty.

The movie’s saving grace is the chemistry between Carrie and her friends. Sure, their jokes are corny and their conversations rarely move beyond men and merchandise, but the friendships feel real. When Parker, Cattrall, Davis and Nixon share the screen, “Sex” isn’t so bad, and it’s easy to overlook the inherent shallowness of the characters. They may live in a fairytale land full of sumptuous apartments, impromptu Mexican getaways and glitzy fashion shows, but the friendship among them ring true.

The downside to that, though, is that when the four women go their separate ways throughout the movie, the pacing drags. Though she’s the lynchpin of the “Sex” universe, Carrie’s big-screen struggles just aren’t all that interesting. The central conflict in “Sex,” between Carrie’s desire for a sumptuous wedding and Big’s commitment-phobia, is flaccid, primarily because the pair’s relationship is never given any weight. As a character, Big is barely sketched out, and it’s no wonder that Chris Noth does little more than smile wryly and pout glumly for the few moments he’s on screen. That’s pretty much what all the men in the film do, but hey, this is sort of a girls-only hang-out. For fans of the show, Carrie and Big have six seasons of a tumultuous urban courtship behind them. But the movie never makes the case for why they should be together, a lapse that leaves the movie’s central story just as empty as last season’s Prada purse.

In terms of titillation, there is some sex in “Sex,” but it’s not very hot or explicit. And, in light of the sudden rise in male nudity in Judd Apatow productions like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Walk Hard,” the random penis shot in “Sex” does little more than confirm that dicks are the new boobs when it comes to movie nudity. The girl talk never gets that dirty, though things get a little lowbrow when Charlotte violates the cardinal rule of Mexican vacations and accidentally drinks the water.

“Sex” has always been about excess, whether in the form of too-expensive shoes or one cosmo too many, but the leap from small screen to big screen resulted in an excess of plot. Carrie and Big’s drama, though only half fleshed out, would have been enough to carry the movie, but writer/director Michael Patrick King tries to squeeze in heavy plotlines for all four women. Miranda and her husband find their marriage on the rocks, and Samantha must avoid the temptation to bed her hunky neighbor while her celebrity boyfriend is at work. There’s enough strife about sex and marriage to fill a full season on television, but King stuffs it all into two and a half hours, along with some added complications in the last act that drag the pace of the movie down to that of a slow shuffle in busted high-heels on an icy New York sidewalk.

By the time “Sex” crawls to its unsurprising conclusion, Carrie and company are certainly older, but whether or not they’re wiser is debatable. The emotional payoffs for each character lack the punch found in the series and it feels as if everyone is back at square one. As the women on “Sex” might say, it’s not necessarily the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean. In that case, “Sex” might have been better off in the calmer harbors of the small screen than venturing into deep sea of the Cineplex.