708. Sex Tape (2014)

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Lowe

Director: Jake Kasdan

Running Time: 94 mins

Sex Tape is an American film about a married couple who, in an attempt to spice up their relationship, decide to film their own three-hour long sex tape. However, when they find out that the video has got out, they set out on a mad search to track it down.

This film really isn’t funny. It’s not even fun. Admittedly, it’s got a totally stupid premise that should just be silly but entertaining, but it seriously fails in giving any form of decent laughs or enjoyment due to its totally predictable story, horrifically poor comedy, and worst of all, terrible PRODUCT PLACEMENT.

You may remember the anger that The Internship caused for effectively being a two-hour long Google advert. This is even worse. Although it’s only an hour and a half long, there are almost minutely references (or advertisements) to the brilliance of Apple products. The word ‘iPad’ is said a million times in this film, the characters give direct suggestions to ‘how good the camera on an iPad is’, or ‘how well-made they are’, and every single appliance in this film is Apple-made. In short, this is a pathetic excuse for a film, just an opportunity to market this supposedly amazing products.

Anyway, that rant’s over for now, and we can move onto the next one. This film isn’t funny. It’s a comedy, and what’s more is that it’s meant to be a stupid, light-hearted comedy that can be simplistically enjoyable, but when you’ve got no jokes in a film, like this, it’s not possible to pull that off.

Honestly, I didn’t laugh once throughout this entire film, and every time that I could see a big joke coming up, the punchline was so obvious and predictable that it totally ruined every single part of the film, meaning this was not only tediously unfunny, but also incredibly frustrating to watch.

Finally, this film has no story. It’s got the relatively loose premise of a frantic search for a computer file, but it goes completely out of control in the second act and means you lose all interest in whatever the hell is going on.

And even worse, come the end, we have a cameo appearance by Jack Black, who tries to take on this pointlessly moralistic role saying that you shouldn’t make sex tapes because it only represents that your marriage is faltering, but that message doesn’t fit in at all well with this incredibly shallow, dull and frustrating film, and for that, this gets a 2.5.