The Forced Farce SEX TAPE Plays It Too Safe

SEX TAPE (Dir. Jake Kasdan, 2014)

Jake Kasdan’s follow-up to his lackluster 2011 BAD TEACHER, which re-unites that film’s stars, starts promising with Cameron Diaz mommy blogging about how her and her husband Jason Segel were once sex-crazed college sweethearts.

Diaz’s voiceover takes us through an amusing opening montage of flashbacks, featuring Diaz and Segel fornicating every chance they get; everywhere they can on campus. But now, as she laments, they’re married with two children and tons of adult responsibilities, leaving very little time for intimacy.

So Diaz decides to send the kids off to her mother’s, dress up like Roller Girl from BOOGIE NIGHTS, and entice her hubby to try every position in “The Joy of Sex.” Segel loves the idea (“I’m very excited right now!”), and sets up his new iPad to record their sexy-time activities.

After their three hour session, Segel stupidly doesn’t delete the video like Diaz asks him to do, and in the next day it gets leaked out to all the iPads that he’s given away to friends as gifts (he’s a music industry exec – reminiscent of Paul Rudd's character in THIS IS 40 - who constantly buys new iPads to upgrade, you see). As mysterious texts taunt the couple about their video’s embarrassing content, Diaz and Segel frantically scramble to keep their friends, neighbors, and even the postman from seeing it.

This is a perfect setup for some juicy social satire, but sadly SEX TAPE takes turns into severely strained sitcom terrain. Diaz and Segel running around to steal back the offending iPads takes us through several exceedingly stupid scenarios, especially one involving Rob Lowe, no stranger to sex tapes, as a CEO of a company interested in buying Diaz’s mommy blog.

Diaz and Segel deceive their way into the creepy Lowe’s mansion, and while Segel is chased by a trained attack dog while trying to retrieve his iPad, Diaz snorts cocaine with Lowe as Slayer blares on the stereo.

This sounds funnier than it is, as I bet much of the movie would in description, but the sloppy execution creaks resulting in more cringes than laughs.

Rob Corrdry, who always seems to be the sleazy best friend to the male lead in these movies, and Ellie Kemper (The Office, BRIDESMAIDS) tag along as Diaz and Segel’s neighbor friends, whose son (the obnoxiously smug Harrison Holzer) turns out to be the one who discovered the video. Holzer tries to blackmail Segel with the threat of uploading their film to YouPorn unless he’s paid $25,000, so then the plot goes from getting back all the iPads to breaking into the pornographic website’s headquarters to get the video off their server.

For all of Segel’s constant yapping about how nobody understands “the cloud,” and the privacy issue conflicts that the film flirts with, SEX TAPE really doesn’t have any real take on touchy subject of sex in the age of the internet. Its only semblance of a point of view, offered by Segel after finding an eleven inch double-sided dildo in a drawer in Lowe’s home, seems to be that everybody has sexual fetishes that they’d prefer to keep private.

Despite that plenty of Diaz and Segel’s flesh is on display, this forced farce is tediously unsexy. It keeps dangling the carrot of racy fun in front of its audience, then snatches it away again and again. Even when it gets to its HANGOVER style finale – i.e. in which we finally get to see a bit of the shenanigans the whole film has been teasing – the clunky slapstick in each shot sabotages any sense of titillation.

SEX TAPE doesn’t improve much on Kasdan’s BAD TEACHER (soon to have a sequel) and it comes nowhere near the comic heights of the director’s best film WALK HARD. It’s a shame because Diaz and Segel have good comic chemistry together – their excited back and forths made me giggle a few times – but they so deserve a much sharper, way weightier screenplay than what Segel co-scripted with Kate Angelo, and Nicholas Stoller.

I so wanted to like it because Diaz and Segel make such a likably attractive yet dorky couple. It's too bad that they're stuck in this throwaway of a summer comedy, one that, much like Ben Falcone's mediocre Melissa McCarthy vehicle TAMMY, overestimates how laughter it can get from its talented cast riffing on top of a bare bones lowbrow premise.

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TAMMY: The Film Babble Blog Review

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TAMMY (Dir. Ben Falcone, 2014)

Although she’s been in mostly mediocre movies, Melissa McCarthy is one of the funniest people on the planet. I’ve witnessed McCarthy’s blustery brand of in your face humor eliciting loud, pure laughter from audiences throughout such throwaway comedies as IDENTITY THIEF and last summer’s THE HEAT (both huge hits), and her commitment to even the stupidest of sketches has made her hosting stints on Saturday Night Live into events.

But even with the low expectations I had going into her latest lowbrow lark, I felt largely let down.

TAMMY, the dream project of McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone (best known as the Air Marshall in BRIDESMAIDS), who co-wrote and directed, is about a white trashy loser who after getting fired from her job, and finding out her husband has been cheating, goes on a cross country road trip with her grandmother (Susan Sarandon).

Since we’ve got Sarandon’s presence in a summer road-trip scenario involving a robbery and some tawdry living, let’s consider it THELMA AND LOUISE, just not with Louise or the cultural significance.

We first meet McCarthy’s Tammy on her way to work at the fictional chain “TopperJacks” singing along to the ‘80s track “Your Love” by the Outfield (apparently the singing along to the car radio scene in IDENTITY THIEF was such a success that it bears repeating).

McCarthy collides with a deer, and totals her car, but, as if to show us she’s got a heart, she attempts to give the wounded animal CPR. Next, our mess of a heroine gets fired from her crappy job by her slimy boss (Falcone), then comes home to find hubby Nat Faxon having an elegant dinner with Toni Collette as his neighbor mistress.

McCarthy packs her things and walks three houses down to mother Allison Janney’s house (everybody lives on the same street, which is fairly funny) where she decides to up and leave town with the boozing Sarandon, as her grandmother has a car and lots of cash, to go visit Niagara Falls.

McCarthy and Sarandon drink heavily (while driving), McCarthy gets in a jet skiing accident, and they hook-up with Gary Cole and Mark Duplass as father and son at a Louisiana bar. Well, actually, Sarandon hooks up with Cole, but McCarthy comes on a bit strong and scares off Duplass.

More drunken mischief, and a bag of illegal oxycontin, lands the duo in jail with only enough money to bail out McCarthy, so she turns to crime in the form of robbing a “TopperJacks” in order to get the money.

The hold-up set piece, with McCarthy sporting a bag on her head while she clutches her sunglasses wrapped up in another bag to resemble a gun, is for sure the funniest part of the film, no small thanks to the exchanges with the place’s employees Sara Baker (who made a bit of splash recently on Louie), and Rich Williams (guitarist for the band Kansas).

After that slowly heads downhill despite the always welcome Kathy Bates popping up as an old friend of Sarandon’s who’s hosting a lesbian Fourth of July party with her girlfriend Sandra Oh, who I can’t remember having a significant line or moment in the movie. Same thing could be said for Colette and Janney, come to think of it.

At least Dan Aykroyd as McCarthy’s father who comes in towards the end makes more of an impression.

TAMMY feels like a slapdash affair, even though McCarthy and Falcone worked on it for several years. I can’t say I didn’t laugh at TAMMY, but the film has way less than a third of the laughs that 22 JUMP STREET had. 

A lot of gags are lazy, and depend on the lead character’s stupidity like a bit about not knowing who Mark Twain was, or cursing the price of gasoline with the obvious and overdone line “Thanks, Obamacare!”

And in the emotional resonance department, the realizations and lessons about family learned just seem like standard sitcom connections.

Still, TAMMY will most likely conquer the box office this fourth of July holiday weekend. I felt such a warmth towards McCarthy at the preview screening I attended, and I think it’s because many Americans really relate and see themselves in her. That’s especially true here in the south where the film was largely shot.

But the way TAMMY most resembles America is that with this much potential, it really should be better than it is.

Happy Independence Day everybody!

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