This is yet another sex friends romantic comedy, a genre that has become far too popular in the last couple of years. Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) keep bumping into one another over a period of fifteen years and eventually have sex. Emma is afraid of relationships and commitment etc so they decide to forgo any relationship and just have no strings attached sex. Predictably things don’t stay sweet for long and when Adam wants more from their relationship, Emma decided to break it off only to realise that she really does love him after all. Maybe I should have started this paragraph with ‘Spoiler Alert’ but anyone with an IQ higher than that of a Satsuma could guess how things are going to go.
After winning her Oscar for Black Swan it would appear that Portman is taking time off from acting by appearing in both this and Your Highness in the same year. I hope her sabbatical ends soon because she is wasted in these roles. Ashton Kutcher plays the Ashton Kutcher character, something he plays well but he is an annoying screen presence who sucks the life out of any movie he appears in. Some of the supporting cast are ok but there are far too many of them so no one character gets more than a few lines of dialogue. The character of Adam’s father, which was quite a large role, served no purpose and the father and son back story went nowhere.
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| Kutcher proving he can bench press 90lbs |
The story is so unbelievably dull and predictable that my girlfriend (who made me watch the film) suggested turning it off half way though. I think it is trying to be clever by using the female character as the one who is afraid of commitment but this is hardly a new idea and the sex-friends angle has been done numerous times recently in films such as Love & Other Drugs (review here) and Friends with Benefits both of which are far sweeter and funnier.
The film did have one or two good lines and I laughed once and chucked a couple of times but it falls well short of the Kermode five-laughs-or-more-makes-a-comedy rule which I Adhere to. I also felt no compassion for Portman’s character who we are meant to feel sorry for when she realises she has made a mistake. It’s her own stupid fault.
This film should be avoided at all costs. If you really want to see a fuck buddies comedy then try one of the films mentioned above instead.
3/10
