If sex were anything like watching “Sex Tape,” no one would be having it. “Sex Tape” is a comedy that isn’t funny, an adult film that isn’t sexy, and a movie that’s barely watchable.
It starts out promising enough. We meet Jay (Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz), a young couple with a very healthy sex life, to put it mildly. One marriage ceremony and a couple of kids later, however, and they’ve hit the skids between the sheets. When Jay fails to rise to the occasion one night when their children are gone, Annie suggests they film themselves trying every position in “The Joy of Sex.”
Her idea works like a charm. Unfortunately, Jay’s IQ drops several points after their evening of indulgence, and instead of deleting the video, as Annie instructed him to do, he accidentally sends it to everyone to whom he and his wife had given an iPad, including her boss and their mailman.
The list of recipients seems odd. Why would Annie give an iPad to her wealthy employer? Who gives their mailman such an expensive gift? But never mind. In “Sex Tape,” logic takes a back seat to lame screwball comedy antics.
Speaking of lame, Jay and Annie do the only thing a couple in their position (or several dozen positions) can do: steal all of the iPads. This leads to a series of painfully contrived scenes, the worst being the one in which Annie distracts her boss by snorting cocaine with him while Jay searches his house for the iPad. Do I need to tell you the boss owns a German Shepherd guard dog, and that crazy canine high jinks ensue?
“Sex Tape” gets worse from there. After Jay and Annie reclaim the iPads, their neighbor’s son threatens to upload the video to an adult website unless they give him a huge pile of cash. After they fail to come up with the money and the young teen makes good on his promise, they decide to break into the headquarters of the website and smash its servers with a baseball bat. Because that can happen.
“Sex Tape” is desperate for laughs by this point, but the filmmakers were unable to deliver them. Instead of devising a scene in which humor rises naturally out of the situation, they create a situation they intend to be funny in and of itself and stage several awkward scenes around it. I can imagine the meeting during which the writers, knowing they’d reached a creative dead end, came up with this:
“What if they wake up their kids in the middle of the night and drive to the porn site’s headquarters? And what if they ram their minivan through the loading dock door to get in? Ha! And what if Jack Black plays the owner of the website? And what if he catches them and drops several F-bombs in front of the kids?!”
Ho, ho.
Unfortunately, that limp bit isn’t the climax of the movie. Rather, there’s one more scene in which the video might or might not be played in front of hundreds of parents and students at a fourth grade graduation ceremony. Commercials for “Sex Tape” show one outcome when in fact the opposite happens in the movie. You can almost smell the desperation to sell tickets.
There’s no reason to see “Sex Tape.” Its concept is humorous, but that’s where the laughs end. It’s not lewd fun, either, unless brief shots of Diaz’s naked bum are your idea of a good time. And it’s poorly acted and directed. I can think of several (or several dozen) better ways to spend a Saturday night.
One star out of four. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language, and drug use.