The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

Those gaudy embroidered jeans are still traveling among those four teenage pals (America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel), all now in college and about to go their separate ways. Elizabeth Chandler’s script presumes that we’ve played the DVD of the original until we’ve memorized every line—judging from the screening I attended, not a bad bet. Even so, where the original was fresh and lively, this one is stale and plodding; it’s two minutes shorter than the first film, but under Sanaa Hamri’s flat direction it feels 30 minutes longer. The four young stars are as confident as ever, the best reason to see the film—or better still, to see the original yet again. Poor Ferrera is saddled with opening and closing narration that overstates the theme the movie doesn’t quite put across.