Rating :   30/100                                                                       94 Min       

An oddly necrotic and narcissistic film, devoid of almost any humour or value from start to finish. Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz play married couple Jay and Annie, who are reasonably happy, successful and content with their two young children, only thing is they haven’t really been having sex for a while due to their busy lifestyles and, in an effort to spice things up, they decide to make a sex tape together. They are supposed to typify the average young family going through the sort of mundane problems common to all and in this sense the comedy will arise by throwing them into out of the ordinary circumstance – beginning with their epic porno being uploaded to the cloud and then synced with several ipads they gave out to friends and co-workers as presents.

It all gets ‘blown’ away, however, when they go to the home of Annie’s potential future boss (she is trying to sell her ‘mummy’ blog to him) and she sends Jay to look for the ipad while she distracts him, and to do this she decides quite casually to snort coke with him. Indeed, she really enjoys it, seems quite excited by it, and if Jay hadn’t made a reappearance she probably would have began fucking her boss to be pretty soon as well – it’s essentially an advert for doing blow. Jay pulls her up on it briefly when he finds out, but quickly forgets about it. It’s the continuation of the promotion of drug abuse through American comedies that has been going on for some time – for example, if we look at light hearted romcoms like ‘Going the Distance’ (10), where the two romantic leads start socialising to get to know one another and then they start taking hits from a bong together (I think it was a bong, it was a while ago) as if this is a fundamentally socially acceptable thing for all young people to be doing, and similarly with ‘The Heartbreak Kid’ (07) where Ben Stiller marries the wrong person and then he meets the girl of his dreams, Michelle Monaghan, whilst on his honeymoon and they sit smoking marijuana on the beach together – the assumption being that the other girl is square and the two leads are hip and relaxed. Incidentally, it’s a little known fact that marijuana can kill, as was the case for two young men in Germany recently after it stopped their hearts, and indeed in the cases of many such deaths the drug is rarely even tested for.

What we are looking at here is agenda, nothing to do with characterisation, plot, comedy or social commentary but filmmakers who basically want to show off that they think drugs are cool, some of the rich elite in Hollywood that not only have a rather skewed insight into the drug scene compared to the rest of the world but also seem to gloss over the famous and numerous deaths in their family from overdoses, Philip Seymour Hoffman for a recent example. Jason Segel in this film does not look particularly healthy – you can see it in the picture above. He looks decidedly gaunt in the face compared to certainly the last thing I seen him in, which I think was ‘The Five Year Engagement‘, now, for this role he has had to get into pretty good shape for all the nudity scenes and perhaps the stress of this combined with maybe a new diet, or maybe even just stress in general, could account for this – or maybe he is doing cocaine. Given he is one of the screenwriters for this, it would certainly fit the bill. If this was to be the case, and, obviously, I have no idea if it is or not, then he would simultaneously be glamorising drug abuse and also showing the side effects – and that is of course the problem with the casual nature of what they’ve done, they have made it look fun without any thought to the physical harm and the psychological devastation it can wreak on people’s lives and the lives of the ones that love them, and really the market shouldn’t tolerate it.

In contrast, Diaz looks absolutely great and we see a lot of her naked body, and by that same token it’s impossible not to think she only agreed to do the film in order to essentially show off. Annie also continually has a go at Jay for forgetting to delete their recording since, because she is a ‘woman’, she is incapable of doing it herself or for that matter checking that he had deleted it if she was so concerned about it. The website YouPorn features in the film with Jack Black playing its founder, and so again we have to look behind the scenes and realise YouPorn must have a cushy business arrangement with the producers, and by and large the entire film just drags on feeling ever more lame and corrupted, I think I might have laughed once or twice but the jokes were so uninspired that I can’t for the life of me remember when.