SEX TAPE

Jake Kasdan directed BAD TEACHER starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz and it was a genuinely wickedly funny, subversive movie. So why is SEX TAPE, directed by and starring the same actors, so painfully unfunny?  I mean, seriously, I did not laugh once for the entire running time of the film. I didn't even do that inward smile thing. It's not that it was even awkward, what will all the sex-talk.  It was just banal and so at pains to be earnest and good-hearted.  It also features the most absurdly in-your-face and annoying product placement. 

The plot is simple. Diaz and Segel play a happily married couple who realise that they just don't have enough good sex. So one night they get drunk and make a sex tape which the husband is meant to erase from his iPad but doesn't. Worse, it gets synched to all the people who he have his old iPads too, because in the most unbelievably contrived plot necessity, he's a DJ who gives people iPads but doesn't let them resynch them to their own accounts because that would rob them off his awesome playlists.   

Obviously if the film were funnier, the threadbare premise would bother us less. But it isn't witty and the physical humour is just juvenile.  This is most evident in the extended scene where the couple go to the house of the businessman who is on the verge of buying Diaz' website. He espouses family value but is a cokehead.  So while Diaz snorts coke to distract him (how we laughed! not) Segel runs through his mansion chased by a vicious guard-dog. I mean, really?

The whole film is basically just a banal and dull watch where sex is the preserve of well-meaning earnest couples and even pornographers have hearts.  Pass the sick-bucket.

SEX TAPE has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release.