Sex Tape first look review: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel in perky porn-com
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Version 0 of 1. Prudes rest easy; porn enthusiasts be warned. Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape (despite its R-rating and attention-grabbing title) is a silly, harmless little film about a silly, harmless little film; a snug wedding of Hollywood style and content. Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel play a mortified married couple, desperate to retrieve a homemade skin-flick that has somehow leaked on to the web. They were drunk when they made it; it should never have happened. One day, fingers crossed, we shall see a sequel in which the real-life Diaz and Segel come dashing around the multiplexes on a mission to round up every single copy of Sex Tape, wincing in embarrassment each time they see themselves on screen. Until then, this amiable, knockabout caper will just about suffice, even if the plot (co-written by Segel) is so high-concept it might have been scribbled on the back of a studio business card, or lifted from the inside pages of a tabloid magazine. Annie (Diaz) and Jay (Segel) are becalmed in suburbia and saddled with kids. Determined to spice up their love life, they decide to shoot a three-hour adaptation of the Joy of Sex in their living room, only for the resulting epic to seep onto the tablets of friends, family and colleagues alike. “Nobody understands the Cloud!” splutters Jay, who is conveniently unaware that he is able to delete the film remotely. This provides the excuse for the hyperventilating comedy that follows, as the lovers come rattling around the houses, racing against the clock to mop up all the damage. It’s fitfully funny and exuberantly eager to please. The chief problem with Sex Tape, however, is that it remains a comedy of blushes as opposed to full-blown embarrassment. Tellingly, the film-makers elect to show us only discreet, edited snippets from the offending sex tape (a tangle of legs; a few brief flashes of buttocks). But how bad can it be? And what exactly is at stake? Let us not forget that Annie and Jay are a happily married couple in what appears to be a liberal Californian community. It’s not as though she’s a Tea Party activist and he’s the pentecostal preacher out of small-town Alabama. That might have given the film a transgressive whiff of danger. It might have provided the comedy with the Viagra that it needs. Or perhaps I’m missing the point of Kasdan’s film. Pornography, after all, does not rely on nuance, or jeopardy, or even narrative logic. Its success depends on providing a roll call of attractive bodies and a galloping succession of climaxes. In its restrained, teasing fashion, Sex Tape fuctions in much the same way. Barely pausing for breath, Kasdan harries us from one frantic setpiece to the next, while Diaz and Segel perform their duties with gusto (the latter, in particular, is very good as a sweaty middle-aged everyman, still harried by the ghosts of his rambunctious youth). Nestled in the middle of Sex Tape, like a gem in the rough, sits the film's wild, wonky comic highlight. This is the moment in which Rob Lowe’s twinkling, straight-arrow CEO suddenly shows Annie a whole new side of himself, ushering her through his home and pointing out the ghastly Disney reproductions that he has hung on every wall. Lowe, older viewers may recall, became the unwitting, unwilling DW Griffith of the whole sex tape genre after being filmed having sex with two women while attending the 1988 Democratic National Convention. He has long since moved on; he can clearly laugh about it now. For Lowe, it seems, history now repeats itself as high-gloss Hollywood farce. • Sex Tape is out now in the US and Australia. The film will be reviewed again for UK release (3 September). • Review: Segel and Diaz's previous hook-up, Bad Teacher |