Sex Tape centers around a married couple who film themselves in flagrante one night, then accidentally upload the video “to the cloud,” sending it out to all of their friends and coworkers. They are worried that, if they see it, the people in their lives will never be able to forget the image of the two of them having sex. It’s an enticing premise – it’s just too bad that, unlike their tape, the film itself is easily forgettable.
Sex Tape does its best to ground the story by showing us that our heroes, Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Jason Segel), are a once-passionate couple who find their love life bogged down by the stresses of raising two kids and the everyday struggles of adulthood. Diaz and Segel have good chemistry together and the emotional throughline of the film is actually quite sweet, but it’s a fairly predictable conflict that every hacky sitcom in existence has explored several times over. So while the story works on a basic level, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before and there’s no real effort made to differentiate their struggle (or their relationship as a whole) from all of the sexless cinematic marriages that came before it.
Of course, the emotional arc is really just filler. At it’s core, Sex Tape is meant to be a comedy. Unfortunately, it’s just not very funny. Most of the big “laughs” have already been given away in the trailer and most of them boil down to the same joke over and over again – Jay gets a Wile E. Coyote level beating (from a dog, by jumping off a stage, etc.) while trying to prevent someone from seeing the tape.
Segel tries his best to drum up witty banter for Jay to share with his loving wife, both Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper get a few chuckles as the couple’s best friends who are just a little too eager to see the tape and Rob Lowe gives his all playing Annie’s potential new boss Hank, who comes across as an amusingly impure Chris Traeger, but for the most part the film struggles to come up with any big memorable laughs.
It also leans hard into its R-rating. There is a lot of swearing and nudity in it, but it all feels gratuitous and underwhelming. The swearing feels cheap and lazy and the nudity is actually surprisingly tame compared to what most raunchy comedies (including ones featuring Jason Segel) have show on-screen. You see a lot of asses and side boobs, but even as the couple attempt to hit every position in the infamous Joy of Sex, there isn’t much shown that would have to be cut out of a running of this film on basic cable.
One of the other big problems with the film is just how convoluted the explanation for how the couple’s tape gets out, and the ensuing quest to get it back, is. Jay, who has some sort of undefined job working for a radio station, comes up with new playlists on matching iPads for some reason. Why he needs two iPads is unclear. Even more confusing is the fact that, for some reason, he has to keep getting new iPads to replace the old ones. When that happens, he gives his old iPads away to friends and coworkers and even the mailman.
This is where the leaked sex tape comes in. Jay keeps all of these gifted iPads synced to his iTunes account so that he can share new playlists with the recipients. So, of course, their sex tape ends up getting added to “the cloud,” which means that everyone who owns one of these iPads now has access to it.
Logically, this makes enough sense for the premise to work, but it’s a lot of bizarre hoops to jump through to get from Point A to Point B. Also, it takes a third of the film for another character to point out to Jay that instead of going from house to house retrieving these iPads, he can simply unsync the file from all of the devices using his home computer, a solution that occurred to me the moment the problem was presented. And, as luck would have it, by the time Jay does realize this solution, copies have already been made and the footage has already found its way to YouPorn’s servers.
Jay and Annie’s attempt to stop YouPorn from posting the video is actually one of the film’s best sequences. This is in large part due to Jack Black’s oddly sweet cameo as YouPorn’s surprisingly sensitive kingpin. Still, it’s a long and winding road to get to that point and the journey there isn’t a terrible compelling one.
In the end, Sex Tape is a film that never really lives up to its premise. It’s occasionally sweet and even less frequently funny, but for the most part, it’s a boring and forgettable outing that leaves you feeling empty when its over.
Which sadly, also describes the sex in a lot of marriages.
Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.