Sometimes, standing in the ticket queue at your local cinema is like standing at a bus stop; you’re waiting ages for one to come along, when two come bombing over the horizon at the same time. Movie theatres follow the same attendant logic, with the Hollywood assumption being: give the chumps even more of what they’re already waiting for – the multiplex double-dip. Such examples include Antz and A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and Shark Tale, and The Illusionist and The Prestige. Deep Impact and Armageddon came shooting across our screens together, making the Earth move with their meteor mayhem, while Dante’s Peak and Volcano blew their respective tops within two months of each other.
And so it is, more double dipping, with Will Gluck’s latest raunchy romcom, Friends with Benefits, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. These friends are late to the party, though, arriving a few months after Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher’s rather similarly themed No Strings Attached* graced our screens to a luke-warm reception. And while Gluck’s film is not a complete disaster, it certainly moves more Earth, and blows a lot harder, than its fellow double-decker friends.
Timberlake plays Dylan, an art director working on a political website in LA, and the target of New York corporate recruiter Jamie (Kunis), who thinks he’s just the perfect fit for a big position at GQ. Tempted by Jamie’s spirited tour of the city as much as the job (though the idea that a flashmob is unheard of to someone under 30 working for a website is preposterous), Dylan leaves behind his west coast roots and moves to the big apple, where he and Jamie become bestest best friends, swapping clichéd pleasantries and, quite often, hilarious barbs while they’re at it. Then one night, after confessing how much they miss the physical part of a relationship while watching a fictional romcom (Jason Segel and Rachida Jones on fine uncredited-cameo form), the two decide to play “tennis”, their coital code word for steamy hot lovin’ sans strings. Will it be a carefree set of New balls, please, or will Jamie and Dylan realise that every game of “tennis” starts at love all?
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| Justin's new partner still hadn't grasped the fundamentals of Dick in a Box |
The problem with Friends with Benefits is that it is a game of two distinct halves; on the one side we have a frequently laugh out loud comedy, with Kunis and Timberlake on flying form as the spiritual grown-up children of When Harry Met Sally, strolling around Manhattan, slinging salacious quips and sly digs about sex and relationships, in well directed scenes of ballsy banter. This half works perfectly, the leads being likeable and entertaining, and undoubtedly sexy while they’re at it, with Timberlake making up for his Bad Teacher disaster with hitherto hidden comic timing, and Kunis lighting up the screen with her doe-eyed dirty talk.
The other side, however, is the same old insipid slide into familiar, and painfully banal, romcom territory. There’s a kooky mom (Patricia Clarkson), a wise older sister (Jenna Elfman), a cute nephew (Modern Family’s Nolan Gould), a sassy gay friend (Woody Harrelson), and chronically ill father (Richard Jenkins), whose bouts of “Movie Alzheimer’s” lucidity are fortunately timed to meet his son’s needs of old-timer wisdom. While these stock characters aren’t inherently bad, their presence is generally focussed on pushing the two f-buddies into the inevitable ending, telling Dylan and Jamie, end everybody in the audience, things we already know – that you can’t play “tennis” without strings in your rackets.
Some great foreplay falls foul of run-of-the-mill characters and plot turns, and a too twee take on no strings yarn.
3 Likes.
Released Nationwide: September 9th
Runtime: 109 mins
Certificate: 16
*The only string actually attached was that Ivan Reitman’s movie had to change its name from Friends with Benefits.
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