Review: Sex Tape

Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz play a once hot-and-heavy couple whose sex life has taken a back seat in the more recent years of their marriage in favour of work and child raising. However, they get an inspired idea to ship the kids off to Grandma’s for the night so they can get their groove on…and film it! Supposedly comedic hilarity comes about when Segel ignores his wife’s request to delete it the next day, proud of his efforts with the horizontal mambo. Unfortunately Segel, who likes to give iPads with his own personally selected music choices on them to friends and family, has accidentally uploaded the footage to every…single…person who owns one of the iPads. It’s now a race to locate each of the iPads before anyone sees it. However, they hit a snag, though you’ll need to see the film to find out what that is. Rob Lowe turns up as Diaz’s rich nebbish boss, Rob Corddry (Is there a less funny person more pervasive in cinematic comedies today?) plays a friend of the randy couple, and Jack Black turns up briefly as an internet porn company owner.

 

Even if you take the use of the outdated word ‘tape’ to mean anything recorded, there’s still the distinct stench of ‘stale comedy’ to this 2014 so-called comedy from director Jake Kasdan (the entertaining spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”, the flat “Bad Teacher”, with a miscast Cameron Diaz). It makes no sense to do a film on this subject in 2014. Movies rarely contain any nudity anymore, let alone mainstream movies, and although there is indeed a teeny bit of cheeky nudity in this one (and surprisingly, it’s mostly not from Jason Segel), it’s done in such a manner that one is highly suspicious as to whether body doubles were used. Yes, even the scene where Diaz is walking away from the camera and we see her arse, side boob and face, I wasn’t entirely certain it was really her. It’s at enough of a distance that you can’t see her face clearly and Robert Rodriguez proved in “Machete” that you can use CGI trickery to get around a pesky no-nudity clause. Ms. Diaz claims it was her real body on show, but given that we see a supposed sex montage between her and Segel in the first three minutes of the film and they are both fully-clothed during most of it…yeah, my arse it’s your real arse, honey. Hell, we even get a scene where Diaz bares her chest for Segel with her back to the camera and it’s clearly a fake fucking back because her side boob is way too large to be Ms. Diaz’s real side boob. She uses a fake ‘back double’? Really? So yeah, Diaz is lying for whatever reason (By the way, countless four-letter words are apparently fine by Diaz, which is interesting. I’m fine with them too, mind you, I’m just pointing out her interesting standards). For a film that opens with seven minutes of basically just two people having sex, this thing at best ought to have been called “Body Doubles”, if not “No-Nudity Clause”.

 

But the sex tape itself is an even bigger problem for me. Forget that sex tapes are passé, really, I’ll overlook that one for the sake of giving the film a chance. No, the real problem here is that the film just isn’t allowed to be nearly raunchy enough to portray on screen what it is meant to portray on screen. We live in a society where violence on screen is perfectly fine, but apparently cinematic sex is dirty (Messed up morals if ever I’ve heard them). Why would you make this film in such a sexually conservative climate? The opening sex scene is proof of my point alone, as a happily married couple in a film called “Sex Tape” have sex with no nudity showing at all. Which brings me to the ‘sex tape’. Not only is there no nudity at all shown in this tape (Why would anyone watch a sex tape with no nudity?), but the camerawork is impossible to achieve without a third person being involved for some of it. Lame, and blatantly obvious. Why am I making such a big deal about all of this? Because the film is called “Sex Tape” and is about the recording of two people in love supposedly having sex played by two actors clearly being too careful not to show any ‘icky’ stuff, that’s why. Why would a woman cover herself up with a bedsheet in bed with her own damn husband? No one does that! The film completely fails to do its damn job, and that’s why I’m angry more than anything. Outside of that, it’s also just a really poorly done, lame-brained film with very few laughs.

 

The film’s best joke is Rob Lowe’s casting as a supposedly straight-arrow guy in a film called “Sex Tape”. Clever, though his very casting also reminds you that sex tapes are yesterday’s news. Still, there’s a few chortles here and there, especially Lowe’s array of artwork, which is hilarious. Unfortunately, his character and performance don’t seem all that far removed from what he did back in 1992’s “Wayne’s World”, furthering the film’s outdated feel. There’s also a seriously ill-advised scene of Lowe and Diaz doing coke that just doesn’t belong. Even under these extreme circumstances, her character would not do that. Then again, this is the same film where she and Segel break into the HQ of an internet porn company in the middle of the night, so perhaps I’m giving them too much credit. Still, even if this film were hilarious, I couldn’t forgive a film that has its characters anxiety-ridden about a sex tape, but laughing off cocaine usage. That’s just messed-up on all levels and makes me suspicious of everyone involved in making the film. The latter is a serious issue, the former is embarrassing, but trivial.

 

There’s something really ‘off’ about Jason Segel in this. He seems to be doing all of his scenes as though he’s interacting with a tennis ball instead of Diaz, as though his scene partner is Jar-Jar Binks. Problem is, his eye-line is way off and it’s distracting. It doesn’t help that he and Diaz create the most boring romantic screen couple since Woody and Diane in “Manhattan Murder Mystery”. The film spends more time being a mopey film about the stagnant sex life that comes from being married than it does being a comedy about a fucking sex tape. Did you know that it’s boring to be married and have kids? ‘Coz that’s the only note this film has to play. “Parenthood” had this beat back in 1989 for cryin’ out loud. Hell, the sex tape deal isn’t all that far removed from 1985’s “European Vacation” the more one thinks about it. This is so boring and stupid that it should star Adam Sandler, not Jason Segel. The idiotically unrealistic children in the film certainly seem like leftovers from a Sandler film.

 

The title promises something sexy and maybe dirty, but instead it’s alternately awkward, boring, and coy. And not very funny to boot. The screenplay is by Segel, his pal Nicholas Stoller (“The Muppets”, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), and Kate Angelo (“The Back-Up Plan”), none of whom seem to have watched a sex tape before.

 

Rating: D+