THE Big News for women in search of a Friday night movie is that this film has a dysfunctional woman of every kind – steely mother, wronged wife, predatory lesbian, vampish trollop, sturdy housekeeper – and just about every one deserves better than a movie this superficial and pandering.

Meg Ryan is Mary Haines, the heart of a little knitting circle of ladies who lunch. Having had the good fortune to marry well, she is able to spend her days pottering with fashion design, charity work and family. Or so she thinks. In fact, husband Stephen has been cheating on her with a sultry perfume-spritzing department store girl (Eva Mendes). Her best friend Sylvia (Annette Bening) discovers the truth first, and agonises about how to pass on the good news with gay writer Miriam (Jada Pinkett Smith) and the perma-pregnant Edie (Debra Messing), whose hugely swollen stomach is the equivalent of Ibsen's first act gun.

There are no men in The Women, a quirk that is presented to us as if it's the breakthrough that feminism has been waiting for, rather than a chance to go mad on weak jokes about Botox and food disorders. But there are no fat, rounded or normal women in The Women either.

As it is, The Women is so overstocked with barely used A-list or B-list women that it looks like a Hollywood storage facility for actresses. The trouble is that the movie which brings them all together is decapitated from reality – and I speak as someone who had to watch a bunch of forty-something women tell Carrie Bradshaw she was "beautiful" for 10 minutes with a straight face.

Like Sex And The City, The Women alleges to traffic in such real-world experiences as loneliness, lust and backstabbing, but it treats them all as though they were ingredients for a martini. Mary's predicament ('my husband is cheating on me with someone who can suck footballs through a straw') is presented with such vanity and spinelessness that after watching this middle-aged woman whinge on to her haughty mom (Candice Bergen, with all the best lines), you start to think "Go, Steve!".

The Women was originally a 1930s movie that confirmed the stardom of an aggressively energetic Joan Crawford, who made it all too clear why a husband might prefer her company to an insipid Norma Shearer. This version updates some of its quainter ideals so that the new women are more supportive of each other and have glamorous empowering careers to talk about – but in reality the upgrade seems to have stopped somewhere that is profoundly 1985, with its heavy slick of materialist gloss. There are shopping montages and a long list of couture house loans in the credits, and even Mary's route to recovery is through a fashion show that she hopes will have buyers frothing to snap up her teeny-weeny designs.

A real career breakthrough would be if Mary could sit down to write a smart, witty chick flick that didn't come across as the commercial equivalent of a pseudo-feminist spa day. In The Women, our heroines wander in with their mojos busted and their spark dulled only to emerge two hours later reborn, having undergone nothing more taxing than two hours of silly, sudsy filmmaking.

• On general release