Sex Tape Isn't Sexy—or Funny

Critics were neither titillated nor amused by Sex Tape, the new romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a married couple that tries to spice up their lives by recording a marathon 3-hour bedroom session, and wind up accidentally sending it to everyone they know. As of this writing, it has just a 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics saying things like:

• The porn video Segel and Diaz's characters make "looks like a much better movie than Sex Tape," quips Dana Stevens at Slate, because it seems bold, spontaneous, and funny—whereas the movie it's in "is as timid, bland, and predictable as romantic comedies come." The stars are likeable, though Segel looks distressingly "gaunt" after slimming down to play opposite Diaz. But the script "just keeps trying so doggedly to sell its preposterous—and apparently technologically impossible—comic premise."
• "Sex Tape rises to meet its very low bar; the performances are serviceable and often cute, and I remember laughing a couple of times," admits Moira Macdonald at the Seattle Times. But this is a "disposable," forgettable affair. "Sex Tape really only has one joke, and it wears thin pretty quickly."
• "The homemade porn industry may be thriving, but the romantic comedy is nearly extinct," laments Richard Corliss at Time. Sex Tape is trying to breathe new life into the once-reliable genre, but winds up being "a slow agonizing mudslide of failed intentions." Diaz, a rom-com natural, at least looks game. Segel "often speaks his lines—and remember, they're lines he helped write—with the disheartened, robotoid elocution of a prisoner in an al-Qaeda video."
• It's "an awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. There's a "curious sense of cluelessness and antiquity around this whole enterprise. ... For example, whoa—did you know that Pamela Anderson apparently made a sex tape? Furthermore, kids can do all kinds of crazy stuff with computers!" The characters also chatter about their iPads so much that the movie "sometimes resembles an R-rated Apple infomercial … but if that was the deal, the Cupertino folks need to get their money back."

(More Sex Tape stories.)