Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segal, Rob Lowe, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper, Jack Black, Nat Faxon
Directed by: Jake Kasdan
Synopsis: A married couple wake up to discover that the sex tape they made the evening before has gone missing, leading to a frantic search for its whereabouts.
No this isn’t the title of my latest short movie (sorry to disappoint!) but just another lame attempt at a comedy. Seriously, who comes up with these ideas? And which comedic mastermind writes the scripts?!
Sex Tape is, despite its provocative title, pretty standard fare when it comes to modern comedy. Sure there are some naked bums and obviously a few sex references but in reality it was fairly tame. More importantly it lives and dies by the fact that, as a comedy, it needs to generate laughs and it really messed up on that score. It’s a pretty laugh free zone throughout the movie despite a cast which can all hold their own in these types of movie.
Cameron Diaz and Jason Segal play a couple who have gone from a shag every five minutes to barely having any at all due to their young kids and hectic work schedules. One night they get a rare opportunity of a night to themselves. They decide to rekindle some of the old magic and think that a sex tape would be the best way of doing it. Bad move. For some unexplained reason Jason Segal has a job that involves giving iPads to people, including a variety of friends and family and, oddly, the mailman. So once the sex tape is done it ends up on the ‘cloud’ for everyone to see. Hereafter the film becomes a race for the couple to get back all these iPads before anyone sees their antics, which of course does not run smoothly.
Besides being as big an advert for Apple as you can possibly get (and by recent cinema offerings that is going some) it is also just faintly ludicrous. I mean clearly someone thought a film about a sex tape ending up on the cloud was a good idea, but they realised it wouldn’t work because obviously no one has access to your cloud other than you, so they thought up a work around involving the giving out of iPads. That’s a lame plot point straight away, and the rest of the film just carries on from there.
I’d say I feel a bit sorry for the actors caught up in this mess, but heh, they read the script before agreeing to it! I can’t really think of a redeeming feature about Sex Tape other than Jason Segal is, as usual, kind of likeable, and Cameron Diaz showed off her bum! Even Jack Black’s cameo as the owner of Pornhub was completely average and failed to register a laugh.