Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel’s new movie is an R-rated comedy that’s surprisingly cautious about sex.
Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel in Sex Tape.
Columbia Pictures
The premise of Sex Tape, which opens nationwide this Friday, is on point in our age of rampant self-documentation and fears about accidental internet celebrity...at least in theory. Married couple Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Jason Segel) realize their love life has wilted now that they're working(ish) parents — she's a mommy blogger, poised to sell her site, and he's in radio or whatever. And with their two kids away for the night, the couple tries to spice things up by tossing back tequila shots and making their own adult home video. Then, thanks to the magic of movies and some mumbo jumbo about Jay's habit of trading up iPads he syncs using a custom app, the video ends up in the hands of everyone he's gifted with a secondhand device, including their best friends (Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper), Annie's potential new boss (Rob Lowe), and the mailman (Dave Allen).
It's the setup for some bawdy laughs about what happens when you become accidental porn stars and the world wide web is given entrée into your most intimate moments. But Sex Tape, directed by Bad Teacher's Jake Kasdan and written by Segel, Kate Angelo, and Nicholas Stoller, never makes it that far. Instead, for a movie about amateur porn, Sex Tape is fundamentally conservative in its treatment of sex.
Columbia Pictures
Annie and Jay meet during college (Diaz and Segel disguise themselves as early twentysomethings by wearing sweatshirts), and they may go at it eagerly, frequently, and everywhere, but they're still well on the road to good ol' hetero monogamy, white picket fence and all. The video is their first excursion into even the mildly freaky, and to do it, they reach back to the musty bible of lovemaking that is The Joy of Sex, cycling through every position it depicts over a marathon three hours.
Sex Tape is only pro-sex — Annie and Jay talk about porn and how they used to watch it together — in the context of marriage. Even the porn king played by Jack Black (don't ask) turns out to have tied the knot and to be a father of two, and lectures the couple about how making sex tapes is a sign of how "you've lost track of why you're fucking in the first place."
The real question of how to keep a long-term relationship passionate is skirted in favor of a rote message of remembering to appreciate your partner. And, despite a stale joke about the contents of a supposedly conservative character's nightstand and how everyone's hiding a wild side, the whole story is basically about punishing its main characters for having dabbled in minor kink.
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