Film Review: ‘Sex Tape’ a Comedy Sorely Lacking in Laughs

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Average: 5 (1 vote)

CHICAGO – Jason Segel is usually fun to watch in just about anything, but he sure isn’t fun in “Sex Tape,” a big studio summer comedy with a fatal flaw - it doesn’t seem to know what’s funny. So like a stand-up comedian on a bad night, it feverishly and desperately throws anything it can think of at the screen in the vague hope that it might be funny even incidentally. Unfortunately Segel, and his co-writers Nicholas Stoller and Kate Angelo needed to think a little harder. Segel’s best work is rooted in human nature. This one seems rooted in sitcoms instead, and not very good ones at that.

HollywoodChicago.com Oscarman rating: 1.5/5.0
Rating: 1.5/5.0

In “Sex Tape,” Segel and Cameron Diaz play a married couple with two children. They started out hot and heavy, but now their sex life has gone stale. So they decide to make a sex tape to spice things up purely for their own enjoyment. But before you can say YouTube, their sex tape leaks onto the internet.

This very well could have been a small, raunchy, but touching movie about a couple’s mishaps while trying to liven up their sex life. But you can almost see the movie making the exact wrong choices at nearly every junction. I’m not sure if this is the result of studio interference, or whether Segel and Stoller just wrote this with something else on their minds. Instead of staying small, the film blows its situations up to absurd proportions and obliterates whatever small humorous insights it had in favor of increasingly hackneyed slapstick.

“Sex Tape” opens everywhere on July 18th. Featuring Jason Segel, Cameron Diaz, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper and Rob Lowe.  Screenplay by Jason Segel, Nicholas Stoller, and Kate Angelo.  Directed by Jake Kasdan. Rated “R”

StarContinue reading for Spike Walters’ full review of “Sex Tape”

Jason Segel, Cameron Diaz
Jay (Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz) Get Busy in ‘Sex Tape’
Photo credit: Sony Pictures Releasing

StarContinue reading for Spike Walters’ full review of “Sex Tape”

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