A successful adult comedy is all about walking a tightrope between raunch and sentiment, but Sex Tape fails spectacularly.
Segel and Diaz play Jay and Annie, a bored married couple who shoot an intimate home movie, then find themselves racing through the night to stop it going viral. This is a premise that provides plenty of opportunity for high jinks, and while I can handle Segel's hangdog self-ironising goofiness only in small doses, both stars are undeniably pros.
New boots and panties: Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz try to spice up their love life in Sex Tape.
Still, there are early indications that the film isn't going
to work. First, the title is off: strictly speaking there's
no tape here, just an MP4 file, and the details of how it finds its way
onto the cloud are convoluted and never funny.
Second, we're told that Jay and Annie spent their evening of passion working through every position to be found in a 1970s copy of The Joy of Sex. But how provocative, really, is the notion of amateur porn that proceeds literally by the book? For comic effect, Kasdan and his team might have been better advised to skip over the details and let the viewer's imagination run wild.
The overall problem is that for an supposedly outrageous farce Sex Tape plays things extremely safe. Kasdan may not be a puritan in the usual sense, but he's too temperamentally cautious to make the film openly an exercise in titillation, or to risk pointed satire of either wholesome family values or the porn industry itself.
He even avoids assigning his protagonists any overly specific character traits. Jay works in the music industry, but we learn nothing about what the job means to him. Still less persuasively, Annie is depicted as a “mommy blogger” who's about to sign a deal with a multinational toy company, a career move we're meant to see as a positive even after her future boss Hank, played by Rob Lowe, proves thoroughly deranged.
Lowe's presence is intended as a joke in itself – but will his notoriety as the original celebrity sex tape star be recalled by many viewers under 40? At any rate, an interminable sequence set in Hank's mansion, where Annie snorts coke while Jay is chased by a German shepherd, is one of the weakest excuses for a comic setpiece in any recent film not starring Adam Sandler.
Trailer: Sex Tape
A married couple wake up to
discover that the sex tape they made the evening before has gone
missing, leading to a frantic search for its whereabouts.
Reviewer rating:
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
Reader rating:
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
(21
votes)
- Genre
- Comedy
- Running time
- 94 min
- Director
- Jake Kasdan
- Screen writer
- Kate Angelo, Jason Segel, Nicholas Stoller
- Actors
- Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Lowe
- OFLC rating
- MA 15+
- Year
- 2014
- Language
- English
- More on Sex Tape
- Movie session times
- Full movies coverage
Segel and Diaz play Jay and Annie, a bored married couple who shoot an intimate home movie, then find themselves racing through the night to stop it going viral. This is a premise that provides plenty of opportunity for high jinks, and while I can handle Segel's hangdog self-ironising goofiness only in small doses, both stars are undeniably pros.
Second, we're told that Jay and Annie spent their evening of passion working through every position to be found in a 1970s copy of The Joy of Sex. But how provocative, really, is the notion of amateur porn that proceeds literally by the book? For comic effect, Kasdan and his team might have been better advised to skip over the details and let the viewer's imagination run wild.
The overall problem is that for an supposedly outrageous farce Sex Tape plays things extremely safe. Kasdan may not be a puritan in the usual sense, but he's too temperamentally cautious to make the film openly an exercise in titillation, or to risk pointed satire of either wholesome family values or the porn industry itself.
He even avoids assigning his protagonists any overly specific character traits. Jay works in the music industry, but we learn nothing about what the job means to him. Still less persuasively, Annie is depicted as a “mommy blogger” who's about to sign a deal with a multinational toy company, a career move we're meant to see as a positive even after her future boss Hank, played by Rob Lowe, proves thoroughly deranged.
Lowe's presence is intended as a joke in itself – but will his notoriety as the original celebrity sex tape star be recalled by many viewers under 40? At any rate, an interminable sequence set in Hank's mansion, where Annie snorts coke while Jay is chased by a German shepherd, is one of the weakest excuses for a comic setpiece in any recent film not starring Adam Sandler.
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