The problems start at the title. Sex Tape . For one thing, there is no ‘tape’. It’s a sex mp4 if anything. For another, from the iPad-centric plot to all the yammering about ‘the Cloud’, Jake Kasdan’s ( Bad Teacher ) film strains after a relevance that only makes it look instantly dated. In five years it will all seem like complete gibberish. But that doesn’t stop it hammering home product placement – in this case Apple – with a relentlessness to rival last year’s Google-tastic The Internship . And it’s just as funny as that seat-emptier.
Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel play Annie and Jay, a successful suburban couple with kids who have lost their passion in the bedroom after 10 years of social-climbing and child-rearing. To spice things back up, they decide to burn through their copy of The Joy Of Sex , one position at a time, in a marathon three-hour session. Naturally they film it, and naturally it leaks to all the synced iPads Jay gives away to friends, relatives, the mailman and even Annie’s potential new boss (Rob Lowe).
That’s right, the filmmakers (including Segel, who co-wrote the screenplay) would like you to accept the concept that some guy is giving away all his old iPads to everybody he knows, and that he can afford to do so because his wife is raking in the cash as a “mommy-blogger”. If you’re still willing to hang with that, what follows is a fairly fast-paced night of tablet retrieval, with the embarrassed couple capering around town getting into increasingly sitcom-y situations.
Segel and Diaz are fine, cute and up for it, but they are let down by a cynical script more interested in selling hardware than entertaining the audience. And for a film about amateur porn, it’s alarmingly chaste. However, there is an amazing scene where Rob Lowe and Cameron Diaz snort coke and listen to Slayer. It’s the best scene in the movie. They should have just made it about that.
