The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2

Friday 2nd January 2009, 1:31PM GMT.

Audiences who looked past the unwieldy title of the original The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants back in 2005 were rewarded with a well written and impeccably acted coming of age story.

Aimed at teenage girls, the charming film charted the upheavals and roller-coaster romantic travails of four friends, united by the discovery of a pair of jeans, which magically fitted them all.

The mystical denims travelled the globe with the girls as they found love, compassion and a greater understanding of their parents’ failings.

All of the original cast reunite under new director Sanaa Hamri for this lack lustre sequel, which should have gone straight to DVD.

Ugly Betty star America Ferrara benefits from her rising status by enjoying slightly more screen time than her co-stars this time, playing the supposedly ugly duckling gifted a chance to break the mould.

Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler, who penned the first film, drizzles cloying sentiment more obviously but still manages to navigate the minefield of cliched adolescent angst to find moments of self-reflection and pathos.

Fate conspires to separate best friends Carmen (Ferrera), Bridget (Blake Lively), Lena (Alexis Bledel) and Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) for another summer.

Carmen accompanies attention-seeking diva Julia (Rachel Nichols) to Vermont to take part in a drama festival, where the frumpy teen is dragged into the spotlight to audition for the role of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale.

Hunky leading man Ian (Tom Wisdom) certainly makes it easy to learn the lines, while Julia glares enviously in the wings.

Bridget heads to Turkey on an archaeological dig led by Professor Mehani (Shohreh Aghdashloo) where she finally confronts the anger and pain of her mother’s suicide, while Lena tries to heal the deep wounds of her break-up with fisherman Kostos (Michael Rady) by taking an art class and falling for nude model, Leo (Jesse Williams).

Meanwhile, Libby and her boyfriend Brian (Ricardo Lam) face a pregnancy scare as the pressures of growing up take their toll on the quartet’s longstanding friendship, with only the titular pair of jeans to unite them.

The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2 lacks some of the spark and raw emotion of its predecessor, contriving conflicts (like Kostos’ shotgun marriage) to provide characters with some semblance of a dramatic arc.

The four leads are impressive, given the flimsy material at their disposal, from Lively’s tearful outpourings about her mom (‘Why didn’t she stay alive for me?’) to Tamblyn’s adorable misfit, who hides behind an armour of snarky humour, dispelling the possibility that the condom broke because ‘those things last forever in landfills’.

Romance blossoms and crises are nimbly averted with the minimum of tears and tantrums, with a sun-kissed finale in Greece that coats the obligatory happy ever after with a final sheen of schmaltz.