Features > Movie Reviews > Friends With Benefits…

Now it’s just another lifestyle choice, and grist for tepid romantic comedies. I’m talking about the allure of sex on tap – without any of that messy emotional residue that comes with a real relationship.

Whether or not this is a true reflection of sexual mores among the 21st Century set, the challenge for the filmmakers is how to square such a cynical notional with the conventions of “romance”… a challenge Friends with Benefits can’t answer any more convincingly than No Strings Attached did.

Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) aren’t really friends. She’s a headhunter who persuades him to leave his trendy LA website to become art director at GQ magazine in New York – a gig that’s easily the most pornographic thing in the movie, though he’s inexplicably reluctant to commit to the charms of the Big Apple.

At least in No Strings Attached there was some attempt to make sense of Natalie Portman’s character – she really did seem to have hang ups about people. That’s not the case here: Dylan also has “intimacy issues”, supposedly, but we don’t see much evidence of them, the way he immediately becomes best buds with Jamie. Granted, his father (Richard Jenkins) has Alzheimer’s, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to take yourself off the dating circuit – especially when you live three thousand miles away from home.

As for Jamie, let’s see… She’s smart, funny, successful, and she’s played by Mila Kunis. So of course she doesn’t seem to know anyone in New York except Dylan. She has a crazy hippie mum – played by Patricia Clarkson – and never knew her father, but again, it’s hard to imagine why that should preclude a busy social life.

The movie is desperate to establish its contemporary, plugged in, switched on, hipper-than-thou attitude, especially in the opening scenes which drop gratuitous barbs at such middlebrow icons as John Mayer (“He’s the Sheryl Crow of our generation,” opines a fan) and, get this, sentimental Hollywood romantic comedies of the type churned out by Katherine Heigl and Nora Ephron. There’s even a faux rom-com starring Jason Segel and Rashida Jones that our non-lovers like to poke fun at. (You’ll also spot nods to It Happened One Night and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice if you tear your eyes away from the skin.)

The banter is fast and sometimes funny but also obnoxious, not least in Woody Harrelson’s aggressively gay sports editor, who is like no gay man you have ever meet. It’s also pretty hypocritical, because Jamie and Dylan have smacked skin, Friends with Benefits soon becomes as predictable and corny as anything Ephron wrote.

All of which represents a significant let-down for those of us with high expectations of director Will Gluck, whose last film was the genuinely smart and funny Easy A, and who also takes a re-write credit here.

On the positive side, these friends are easy to look at. But I’m not convinced by Justin Timberlake as a leading man. Maybe I’m showing my age, but he still seems half-formed to me, an eager young man but someone who is essentially pretending to be a grown up. I mean, George Clooney he ain’t. Kunis though (and maybe I’m being subjective here too), she seems like a bright spark, and surely destined for good – or at least, better - things.

You can hardly blame the actors that their roles don’t make sense. The movie does muster some engaging moments, including an amusingly anatomical sex scene or two, and I’d have to give it the edge over No Strings Attached, but it’s not what I’d call convincing evidence that the romantic comedy is thriving.