Films are pretty expensive to make, so why does it happen so often that a movie is unsatisfactory or even just bad? This is subjective, of course, but for me a good movie needs foremost a good story. So if the end product is boring, why was the script turned into a movie in the first place? I know that there's much more to the economics of a film than its artistic value, but still, sometimes I'm just puzzled.
Exhibit A: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. I'm not exactly the target demographic for this movie, but in general, I do think that women make more interesting characters and I like it most when drama and suspense are achieved without crime and violence involved. In other words, I wanted to like this movie, but I couldn't. The story is about four girls who used to be best friends, but were torn apart as the went to different colleges. Most of the time the plot deals with four independent story lines about the usual issues of young people: love, rivalry, self-confidence. Unfortunately this doesn't leave much time for depth, so it made it difficult for me to care about any of them. In fact, it made me want to shout: "Why don't you just get over with it and move on?" Complex stories can work and sum up to a greater total ("Love Actually" is an example, "Crash", I think, too), but it doesn't work here.
Also, presumably to save time, all sense of location was stripped. The characters traveled within the US, as well to Turkey and Greece as easy as double-clicking in Google Earth. For example, in order to get to the island of Santorini, you have to take a plane, then another plane or a ship, then a bus (but not a donkey, since the modern ferry harbor is accessible by car) and a lot of waiting time in between. By totally stripping out traveling from A to B the girls became detached from the hardships of routine life, able to focus solely on their little personal problems. Somebody who's able to spontaneously travel to one of the most beautiful places on Earth should just be happy, with or without a boyfriend.
The movie grossed domestically almost $45 million, which is, I guess, not that bad. But with four talented actresses, two of them with much buzz in current TV shows, and enough budget to film in beautiful locations, why hasn't it made more?