‘Friends With Benefits’ Breaks No New Ground

It might’ve happened exactly like this. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis were in the midst of shooting one of their steamy scenes in Black Swan when they decided to make a bet. What if their characters’ inherently competitive nature continued after filming? What if Portman and Kunis branched off and made the exact same romantic comedy to see which one would fare better with audiences?

This gamble might sound intriguing on paper, but it is proven to offer middling results on film. Portman’s romantic comedy vehicle, No Strings Attached, was released in January, while Kunis’s nearly identical picture, Friends With Benefits, has been saved for a summer release. Both films pair the engaging actresses with a male co-star who doesn’t play characters so much as he explores shades of his slick, crowd-pleasing persona.

Portman got sitcom clown-turned-passable actor Ashton Kutcher, while Kunis got pop star-turned-passable movie clown Justin Timberlake.

Read More: To check out previous movie reviews,

So far, neither film has struck much of a chord with audiences. Perhaps that’s because their premise is so uninspired. Two friends jaded about relationships decide to sleep with each other while agreeing to not get emotionally involved. Eventually, these characters realize that (gasp!) sex complicates things. They’re already such good friends that physical intimacy just happens to bring them closer together than ever.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, if they got any closer, they’d be in back of each other. 

It also helps to be a physical specimen on the order of Justin Timberlake or Mila Kunis. Is it really such a shock that these ridiculously photogenic stars would find each other attractive? I guess that’s the leap of faith one must take when approaching such a cheerfully disposable date movie.

What makes Friends a slight improvement over Strings is the breezy pace and warmhearted tone set by director Will Gluck, who has recently emerged as one of Hollywood’s more promising comedy directors. He allows the premise to be milked for its potential amusement until the film finally strains to force out a false crisis in the last act. 

The plot begins...but seriously, do audiences even care about the plot in a film like this? All that really matters is the chemistry between the stars, and as appealing as Timberlake and Kunis are together, I couldn’t really sense much of a bond.

Yet to be fair, the screenplay doesn’t give either performer much of a chance with its tireless screwball banter blatantly modeled after nonstop talkathons the likes of Howard Hawkes’s 1940 classic His Girl Friday. While Friday’s witty dialogue was uniformly ingenious, the pithy quips in Friends move by so fast that it’s easy to forget the duds and treasure the isolated gems.

Some scenes are paced so quickly that they veer toward self-parody. There’s a moment late in the picture when a child sets himself on fire, Timberlake’s sister nags her perpetually single sibling about his intimacy issues, and a pants-less Richard Jenkins (as Timberlake’s dad) displays signs of Alzheimer’s disease...all in the span of a minute. 

Yet the biggest misstep in the script--co-written by Gluck, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman--is its half-hearted deconstruction of genre clichés. There’s one scene in which Timberlake ridicules romantic comedies that utilize sappy music to signal how audiences should feel at a particularly emotional moment. He also laughs at the use of an “inexplicable pop song” over the end credits to trick viewers into thinking that they actually liked the crappy movie they’ve just seen.

This monologue leads moviegoers to hope that Friends will somehow manage to avoid the generic Hollywood standbys that it trashes. Alas, the film’s supposed cleverness turns out to be little more than bold-faced hypocrisy. It’s not long before Timberlake is wandering alone to the tune of a sappy pop song, and it’s not much later when the film plays Semisonic’s feel-good anthem, “Closing Time,” over the end credits. The song is so catchy that it might cause some viewers to forget the preceding picture’s multiple shortcomings. 

That being said, Friends successfully coasts on the charm of its stars and offers enough chuckles to warrant a viewing (preferably through Netflix unless you’re desperate for a decent date movie). Timberlake can play this type of smooth talker in his sleep, but the act is starting to wear thin. In contrast, Kunis is an utter delight, sporting comic timing perfected by many a season of “Family Guy,” while also hitting enough complex dramatic notes to prove she may be capable of tackling considerably meatier roles in the future.

As for the supporting cast, the exquisite Patricia Clarkson has a ball as Kunis’s promiscuous mother, a character that is more or less identical to the one she played in Gluck’s previous sex farce, Easy A. And as Timberlake’s uber-masculine gay friend, Woody Harrelson is given far too few moments of screen time, though he does manage to score with the film’s best punch-line. When Timberlake asks why he owns a boat, Harrelson explains, “I live in Jersey. I ain’t taking no ferry...unless it’s out to dinner and a show!”

Friends with Benefits opened July 22 at the AMC Showplace Village Crossing 18 and Regal Gardens 7-13 in Skokie. The R-rated release came in third at the weekend box office behind Captain America and Harry Potter, earning $18.5 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Like us on Facebook

Download the movie