It takes directorial ineptness on a monumental scale to screw up a sex comedy. Particularly one that stars ‘Her Hotness’ Cameron Diaz. In the nude. But Jake Kasdan contrives to do it, with an unfunny and unbelievably farcical film that’s guaranteed to put you off sex and perhaps even comedy for a long time.
But then, the problem with Sex Tape goes beyond the limitations of the director. Its storyline itself reeks of over-the-top implausibility to the point where it becomes abundantly clear that the screenplay writers (who include Jason Segel, the lead actor) saw the plotline as a mere prop, a limp sex toy, to set up some extended sit-com silliness.
Which is a shame because the kernel of Sex Tape has enough meat in it for a sophisticated adult comedy yarn to be spun around it. The idea of a sexually jaded married couple (with two kids) looking desperately to get their carnal juices flowing again has a certain universal appeal to it. And even the decision of the protagonist couple Annie and Jay (Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel) to rev things up by videotaping their enactment of every acrobatic act in The Joy of Sex manual isn’t entirely unauthentic. This is the sex-and-the-selfie generation, after all, as the profusion of home video clips on pornographic sites will testify.
But having set up that forgivable storyline contrivance, Kasdan loses the plot. Very quickly, the storyline goes on a downward spiral of unsexy, unfunny farce as Annie and Jay learn that the video has ethereally slipped into the iCloud. And since Jay has a habit of giving away synchronised, hand-me-down iPads (of which he seems to have several, since he’s something in the music industry) to family and friends — and even the neighbourhood mailman (yeah, right!) — their three-hour sex romp is now in the public domain. The rest of the film revolves around Annie and Jay’s slapstick-y efforts to retrieve the gifted iPads and demolish the servers of a porn site to which a young blackmailer (don’t even ask) has uploaded it — before their shame is revealed to the world.
If these scenes had been genuinely funny, one may have been more forgiving of the über-silliness and the sheer implausibility of it all. But all that Sex Tape does is to graphically capture the joylessness of a badly made sex comedy. And after a point, the film’s shameless plugging of Apple merchandise grates.
Apparently, the production crew used the working title of Basic Math because it proved impossible to secure filming locations for a film called Sex Tape . Perhaps they should have stuck to this title for the final release as well. It certainly packs sexier sizzle than anything the film provides.
