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Home / Entertainment

Movie review: Sex Tape a real anti-climax

Francesca Rudkin
By Francesca Rudkin
Entertainment reviewer for NZ Herald.·Other·
18 Jul, 2014 01:30 AM2 mins to read

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Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz play a couple who learn the risks of social media.

Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz play a couple who learn the risks of social media.

For a film that talks a lot about sex and is rated R16, Sex Tape is surprisingly tame, perhaps too tame.

It features plenty of nudity - from behind - of its star couple, a slimmed down Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz, some amusing sexual gymnastics and the occasional laugh-out-loud moment, but overall Sex Tape is a half-hearted effort.

Segel and Diaz play suburban couple Jay and Annie, who decide to liven up their sex life by making a three-hour tape documenting the positions in the book The Joy of Sex. Segel, who has a habit of giving away his work iPad - including to his mother-in-law, best friend (Corddry), wife's potential new employer (Rob Lowe) and the mailman -- is alerted by a mysterious text that he's forgotten to delete their sexual escapade from his computer, which is synced via the cloud to all the iPads.

In a crazed panic Annie and Jay set about retrieving the tablets and deleting their humiliating video.

The setup feels contrived - who'd give the postman an iPad for Christmas? - and Annie and Jay's reaction to what happens feels forced, with their energetic performances an attempt to give the story some momentum.

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For those who understand the workings of "the cloud" you're probably thinking there's an easier way of deleting material from remote devices, but not for Jay. This is one of the funnier ideas, that we're all pumped up about new technology but don't know how to use it - like we saw recently in Chef - and had potential to be worked up further. Sex Tape instead sticks to the more familiar material of how a busy married life with kids strips couples of their sex life - an idea better mined in Date Night.

Watch the trailer for Sex Tape here:

Diaz and Segel are their usual affable selves and Corddry is consistently funny throughout, but Sex Tape suffers from not knowing what it wants to be -- raunchy, crass and irreverent, or sweet, sassy and romantic.


Cast: Jason Segel, Cameron Diaz, Rob Corddry
Director: Jake Kasdan
Running Time: 90 mins
Rating: R16 (Contains sex scenes, sexual content, drug use and offensive language)
Verdict: Mildly amusing comedy that doesn't reach its full potential

- TimeOut

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