Sex Tape

Sex Tape is the latest failed attempt at edgy, salacious comedy from Jake Kasdan, Cameron Diaz, and Jason Segel, the trio who also brought us 2011's unwatchable Bad Teacher. I’m sure a funny and even insightful movie could be made from the premise: after several years of marriage and child-rearing, a husband and wife attempt to recapture their sexual mojo by making an amateur porno video. But Sex Tape offers neither a raunchy, hard-R-rated good time nor a meaningful exploration of how a married couple’s sex life can wither on the vine. We’re the Millers, Friends with Benefits, Wanderlust, and the many other dismal comedies of late purport to offer both boundary-crossing, risqué humor and uplifting parables about true love, but the results of these schizophrenic hybrids, created in some date-movie marketer’s demographic blender, usually end up as cloying, saccharine contrivances.

Kasdan and his stars clearly enjoy working together, and they probably had a lot of fun making the movie, but little of that good feeling carries over for the audience. The script feels like it was dashed off at a bar in six hours and then shot too quickly to cook up anything funnier than what was scribbled on the cocktail napkins, and watching the actors read (or improvise?) the ham-fisted dialogue is painful: “Why do we feel like this?” “When did we stop having sex?” “You’re still so hot!” “I know, and I love you so much.” “What can we do?” “Hey, I’ve got an idea!” When I go to a film like this I don’t expect dialogue that’s the caliber of David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Elaine May, or Jake Kasdon’s father Lawrence, but I don’t think its too much to hope for a level of writing that measures up to the middling talents of Judd Apatow, David Wain, or Kevin Smith. It isn’t just the vapid dialogue; every plot point in the picture requires each of the characters to be utterly thick-headed and naïve to make sense. And when we do see some footage from the sex tape itself, it’s all juvenile sight gags that play like they were designed by people who have no actual experience of sex, yet we’re expected to believe that all the characters who see the tape get instantly and uncontrollably aroused. 

I made it a point to see Sex Tape in a theater with a proper audience. Too often I don't catch up with these silly comedies until after their theatrical runs, which makes me concerned that I'm not watching them in their intended context. But although the folks behind me clearly found the film hysterical, I couldn’t experience it as anything other than an insipid, one-note bore that moved slowly and predictably from one labored set piece to another, all the while squandering every chance to fulfill its comedic potential. The people who made this picture are not untalented. Diaz is a gifted comedic actress, as is evident from her turns in My Best Friend's Wedding, There's Something About Mary, and Being John Malkovich. Segel and his frequent collaborator Nicholas Stoller gave us the amusing The Muppets and The Five-Year Engagement. And Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the funnier over-the-top genre parodies in recent memory. It’s a drag to watch accomplished people phoning it in.