Two stars. Rated R, for nudity, strong sexual content, drug use and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang
Homemade porn (so I’ve been told)
tends to reflect the amateur skills of its makers: jittery camerawork, clumsy
editing, terrible performances and — needless to say — no plot.
Ironic, then, that a so-called
Hollywood comedy about this phenomenon should mimic all these shortcomings.
Sex Tape arises from a premise with plenty of
potential, to give scripters Kate Angelo, Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller at
least that much credit. Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Segel), during their
younger years relentless pursuers of recreational sex, have found that their
mutual passion has chilled after 10 years of marriage and two children.
Hoping to re-ignite the flame —
and with common sense dulled by too many tequila shots — they park the kids
with grandma and film themselves performing every single maneuver in Alex
Comfort’s groundbreaking 1972 manual, The
Joy of Sex.
In a single three-hour session.
That seems ambitious, given that
Comfort’s book is large and rather inventive. But we’ll let that slide.
Mission accomplished, Annie
instructs Jay to erase the film (unseen? really?), but of course the amiable
lunk forgets. Cue the rumble of ominous drums.
In a rather blatant example of
cinematic product placement, Jay — who works in the music biz — traditionally
gifts friends with old iPads, when he upgrades to newer models. But the tablets
are only part of this generous act; they’re also equipped with copies of the
impressive music library he has built over the years.
You know what’s coming: Thanks to
Jay’s ill-advised use of an aggressive cloning app, their sex film winds up on
every recently donated iPad. The recipients include Annie’s mother, the
mailman, best friends Robby and Tess (Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper), and — most
damningly — Hank Rosenbaum (Rob Lowe), CEO of the wholesome multinational toy
company Piper Brothers, which has made a lucrative financial offer to sponsor
Annie’s “modern mommy” blog.
Assuming she maintains
appropriate family values, of course.
(I can’t help wondering if the
scripters deliberately riffed on the controversy that erupted back in the early
1970s, when Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers — who posed with a baby beneath
the tag line “99 & 44/100% pure” — became a porn star with the release of Behind the Green Door. Needless to say,
Procter & Gamble dropped her like a hot coal.)
Clumsy set-up notwithstanding —
for the most part, this ham-fisted flick is all smutty talk, and very little action
— the potential, at this point, seems obvious: Cue a series of hilariously
improbable, Mission Impossible-style
heists, as Annie and Jay attempt to retrieve the various iPads before their
contents are viewed.
Except ... that never happens.
The first few tablets are repossessed
with very little effort, and even less comedy. Then we spend what seems like
hours with Rosenbaum, as Annie distracts him while Jay searches the CEO’s
lavish house. Thereby disturbing Hank’s large German shepherd, which chases Jay
for-ever. While Annie resolutely
continues her role by ... snorting cocaine with Hank, who apparently isn’t as
conservative as he seems.
At about this point, one can only
conclude that director Jake Kasdan is trying to drag laughs from us. Because he
and the cast certainly don’t earn them.
I shouldn’t be surprised, because
Kasdan has a history of moronic, lowest-common-denominator comedy dreck.
Previous big-screen efforts include the gawdawful Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and the not-much-better Bad Teacher, the latter apparently having encouraged Diaz and Segel to further debase themselves with this newest train wreck.
Things go further south when
Robby and Tess’ obnoxious adolescent son, Howard (Harrison Holzer), having
obtained a copy of the sex marathon, threatens to upload it to a porn server
unless Jay forks over $25,000.
By this point, watching Annie and
Jay drop F-bombs like confetti has become merely tedious. Dragging a child into
these smutty proceedings, and giving him similarly coarse dialogue, crosses a
line into something distinctly uncomfortable: definitely shameful, possibly unacceptable.
Either way, very not-funny.
Then, apparently wanting to be
equal-opportunity with the ill-advised exploitation of minors, Annie and Jay
drag their own young children along while gaining unlawful entry to some
massive porn servers, in a naïve attempt to save the day by destroying the
computer banks before their film goes viral.
At which point, I could only
throw up my hands and conclude that the lunatics had taken over the asylum.
Not to mention lamenting the
missed opportunities, while imagining the far superior French film that could
have been made from this same premise. Because, let’s face it: Nobody does sex
comedies better than the French.
And nobody does them worse than
we Americans.
Kasdan’s film is a textbook
example of bad choices, starting with the lengthy prologue’s relentless
said-bookism. We can see Annie and
Jay taking every opportunity to copulate like rabbits, whether in public or
behind closed doors; we don’t need to have them tell each other (and us) how bleeping
much they bleeping love to bleep. That redundant verbal exposition continues
throughout the entire film, long past the point the words themselves have any
ability to amuse, or even offend.
Some supporting players are badly
used, most notably Corddry and Kemper, who spend most of their screen time
standing like statues and staring, blank-faced, at the camera. No doubt Kasdan regards
these as slow-burn reactions to so-called hilarious situations; I call it
somnambulance.
Nat Faxon makes a pointlessly
brief appearance as Jay’s sexting friend Max, never to be seen again. Nancy
Lenehan merely looks confused as Annie’s mother, and well she might; the poor
actress certainly isn’t given anything to do.
Lowe is modestly amusing as the narcissistic
Hank, whose interior décor runs to commissioned artworks that place his face on
key characters in various Disney animated classics. And an unbilled Jack Black
adds some much-needed energy to the third act, as owner of the porn hub that
Annie and Jay attempt to destroy.
Diaz has made a point, during
recent interviews, of acknowledging her game-changing willingness to do much of
this film in the buff; no question, she has ample reason to be pleased with her
42-year-old bod. Segel is equally bold, although we’re spared the Full Monty he
unleashed in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Instead, this film cleverly plays coy with both stars, their
naughty bits concealed by limbs, lamps, cushions and other artfully placed
props ... a gag employed to far greater humor in the Austin Powers films.
Only buns get exposed here.
Frequently. Which also grows old.
Ultimately, this film’s biggest
problem is that it never fully embraces its own premise with the audacious élan
demanded by such material. Everything is cheated and clumsy: barely-there
measures half-heartedly performed by two badly directed stars who rarely live
up to their own verbal enthusiasm.
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