Sex Tape
Jay (Jason Segel: How I Met Your Mother) and Annie (Cameron Diaz: The Other Woman) were insatiable. Their voracious sex life led to an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. Over a decade later, Jay and Annie still love each other, and they are flourishing professionally and personally, but their sex life has gone belly-up. Though both miss the intimacy, they can’t seem to find time for each other.
Jay, who works at a radio station, has a complicated musical filing system that requires two iPads. For some reason, it also requires him to purchase new iPads every few months. He distributes his old ones to friends, family and occasionally business associates.
Writer Annie’s popular blog on motherhood has attracted the attention of a huge corporation. They’d like her to be the face of their mommy blog, as long as she promises to keep the material wholesome. Thrilled at a chance to advance her career, which has stalled since the kids arrived, she plans to celebrate with a wild night of passion.
Alas, Jay and Annie are no longer in synch. Things get awkward until Annie has a brilliant idea: Use Jay’s iPad to make a sex tape and spice up their DOA sex lives.
Apparently, a camera lens is all you need to fix your marital ennui; the sex tape works like a charm. Happy to have reignited the spark, Annie tells Jay to delete the recording from the iPad. In post-coital bliss, Jay forgets and synchs his iPad to his computer. Now, thanks to the cloud and carelessness, Jay and Annie’s X-rated romp has been loaded onto all the iPads that Jay has given away.
Can the couple retrieve them before their reputations are ruined? Or should they film a sequel?
Rude, raunchy and ridiculous, Sex Tape is funny in spite of its plot. The misplaced sex tape has been done in sitcoms over the years, so the concept of a suburban couple terrified that their friends and family will find out that they have sex isn’t a new one. Still, the ease with which information is shared in the digital age could offer up some interesting problems for Annie and Jay.
Director Jake Kasdan (Bad Teacher) isn’t interested in the implications of our media-obsessed culture. His interest is having Diaz flail and make funny faces while Segel flops from pratfall to pratfall. Nor is the crisis believable given what we know about the characters. It seems improbable that a guy who has cycled through at least six iPads in a year knows almost nothing about the cloud, which Segel’s Jay seems to think is a magical entity. There’s also a way to erase data remotely from synched iPads, but Segel and Diaz are too busy panicking to call tech support.
Lazy plotting and lazier character development make Sex Tape a substandard film. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. Kasdan has stacked the deck with so many weird situations and outrageous lines that you’ll find something funny. Diaz and Segel are veteran comedians who can land a punch line out of sheer will. They are aided by supporting players who wring laughs out of the meager script. Rob Lowe, in particular, does some weird and wonderful work as Diaz’s seemingly conservative boss.
Watching the movie is a bit like coming across your neighbor’s sex tape: You know you shouldn’t watch it and it probably won’t be that well-made, but that won’t necessarily stop you.