Review
'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2'
Starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel
Directed by Sanaa Hamri
Rated PG-13
Picking up three years after the original, “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” reunites four friends (Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel) first brought together by a hippie-chic pair of jeans that magically fit each of them. Only this time, the movie makes clear, it’s not about the pants.
The magical pants, used by the foursome to stay in touch and update each other on their adventures (and offer some sweet product placement for FedEx), factor in less and less, until they disappear altogether. It takes a bit for the girls to even notice the absence.
The four young women are set up from the get-go as impossibly responsible role models for the teen girl section of their audience. It’s the summer after their first year of college, and there’s nary a mention of heading to the beach — or relaxing at all, for that matter. No, these upstanding young ladies are each spending their months off doing something educational.
But all the summer programs at NYU or the Rhode Island School of Design are just window dressing for what’s really important: boys. Call it “Sex and the Summer Semester.” As the stories progress, nearly every journey of self-discovery or shedding of inhibitions inevitably falls by the wayside in favor of affairs of the heart.
Only Lively’s Bridget gets to avoid a romantic subplot. Instead, she’s saddled with playing out the movie’s most belabored metaphor: While on an archeological excavation, she confronts long-buried issues concerning her estranged grandmother (Blythe Danner).
Danner and a handful of other actresses pop in to play mentors to the Sisterhood, and it feels like they’re there to insure a bit of acting cred. Sometimes this works, as with Danner, and sometimes it doesn’t, as with Shohreh Aghdashloo as Bridget’s archeology professor. The usually brilliant actress manages somehow to both chew scenery and phone it in at the same time.
But the four stars don’t really need help, as the young actresses handle their roles just fine, elevating what could have been young-adult cardboard cutouts into actual actual characters. Extra credit goes to Tamblyn (from TV’s “Joan of Arcadia”), who has the most fun with her character. Then again, her character gets a disproportionate share of humor and pathos to play with.
This sequel actually crams the three final books in the series into one film, which makes for an uneven, crowded narrative (especially when the audience has to switch its attention to a different protagonist with each scene change) and also suggests this is it, no more Sisterhood movies. Guess they finally outgrew the pants.