Sex Tape arrived in July 2014 with a title that told you the joke, a cast that could sell it, and a premise that runs on a single mechanical failure. Jay and Annie Hargrove, married ten years with two kids, have stopped having sex. They film themselves working through every position in The Joy of Sex on a tablet, and the video syncs to iPads Jay gave away. That is the whole engine of the movie. It is a good engine. Sex Tape just never gets it running.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Jake Kasdan and the Three-Hour Session
The setup is lean. Annie suggests the tape after Jay struggles to get an erection during roleplay. They film a three-hour marathon session covering every position in The Joy of Sex. Annie asks Jay to delete it. An app on the tablet syncs the file to several iPads instead. The couple cannot pull it out of the cloud, so they set out to get back all the gifted iPads.
Jake Kasdan directs. Nicholas Stoller, Jason Segel and Kate Angelo wrote it. It runs 94 minutes and was produced by Columbia Pictures. The tagline promises “A movie about a movie they don’t want you to see.”
That is a fair description of the plot. It is not a description of a comedy, because a comedy needs scenes that build. Sex Tape has errands.
Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel Do the Work
Cameron Diaz plays Annie. Jason Segel plays Jay. Both are likable performers who have carried worse material, and here they carry material that gives them almost nothing to play. Annie and Jay are written as two people reacting to a problem. The problem is not funny. The problem is a file.
The supporting cast is stacked and mostly wasted:
- Rob Corddry as Robby
- Ellie Kemper as Tess
- Rob Lowe as Hank
- Nat Faxon as Max
- Nancy Lenehan as Linda
- Jolene Blalock as Catalina
- Melissa Paulo as Rosie
- Giselle Eisenberg as Nell
- Harrison Holzer as Howard
- Sebastian Hedges Thomas as Clive
Rob Lowe gets what this critic counts as the movie’s only real swing, as Hank Rosenbaum, Annie’s potential boss. Annie distracts him under the guise of asking for charity money while Jay searches the house. She tries cocaine for the first time. Jay fights Hank’s German shepherd. It is the closest Sex Tape comes to a set piece, and it still plays like a sketch that wandered in from another film.
The iPads Are Not the Problem
Here is what actually goes wrong. The movie treats the iPad chase as a series of escalating embarrassments, but every stop is the same stop. Annie and Jay arrive somewhere. Someone makes the situation awkward. They leave. The friends, Robby and Tess, tag along without any real plans, which is the script admitting it has no plans either.
The couple deletes the video on Annie’s mother’s tablet and their son’s tablet. The recovery from Hank’s house is the hard one, and Robby and Tess are the ones who get it back. That should be a payoff. It is a shrug, because the movie never made us care which iPad held the file.
The cloud, as this paper reads it, is the villain. It is also a plot device that removes any need for the couple to be clever. The source material has them fail to get the video out of the cloud and set out to collect the iPads. The movie never lets them solve anything. They can only visit the problem.
Howard and the $25,000
The last act introduces Howard, the son of a friend, who threatens to upload a copy to YouPorn unless Annie and Jay pay him $25,000. They fail to get the money. They break into the YouPorn headquarters and start destroying web servers. An alarm sounds. The plan collapses.
This is where Sex Tape stops being a sex comedy and becomes a movie about a website. The title is a promise the film keeps making and then dodging. There is no tape. There is a file, and then there is a blackmail plot, and then there is a break-in at an office. The movie keeps changing the subject to avoid the subject.
The runtime is 94 minutes. It feels longer, because the middle is a loop.
What $126 Million Buys
Sex Tape grossed $126 million worldwide against a $40 million budget. By this paper’s reading of those two figures, that is a real return for a film that received generally negative reviews. The money says something about the premise. The reviews say something about the execution. Both are correct.
The premise works on paper. A married couple’s private video escaping into the cloud is a genuine modern fear, and the movie knows it. What Sex Tape does not know is what to do with it. It turns a humiliation nightmare into a scavenger hunt, then into a blackmail thriller, then into a break-in. Each turn is a step away from the thing that made the idea worth making.
Diaz and Segel are not the problem, in this critic’s view. Neither is Kasdan, whose direction keeps the thing moving. The problem is that the script, credited to Stoller, Segel and Angelo, treats the couple’s embarrassment as a logistics issue. Every scene is about retrieving an object. No scene is about what it means to be seen. The best version of this movie is about two people who have to look at each other after being looked at. Sex Tape is about two people who have to find an iPad.
Rob Lowe’s cocaine scene is the one moment the film lets itself be stupid in a way that works. Everything around it is a machine for moving characters between houses. As comedy, the German shepherd lands harder than most of the dialogue. That is not a compliment to the dog.
What matters here is not that Sex Tape is crude. It is that it is cautious. A movie with this title should be willing to be embarrassing. Instead it is busy. It runs from one location to the next so it never has to sit in the room where the actual joke lives: two people who used to want each other, now reduced to deleting a file.
The Metacritic score is 36 out of 100, a 3.6 of 10. That is the right number. Sex Tape has a cast that could carry this, a director who has made this kind of comedy work, and a premise that writes its own first act. As criticism, not plot summary: it has no second act and no third. The video goes missing, and so does the movie.
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