Sex Tape

(MA15+) ★

Director: Jake Kasdan.

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper, Rob Lowe.

They couldn't believe how many "hot single women" were "in their area".

Chemistry is everything.

If the lead actors in a relationship-driven film can't make you believe in their relationship, then you've got nothing.

In those terms, Sex Tape is nothing.

Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, despite both being competent actors who have ably demonstrated chemistry with other actors in the past, have absolutely no chemistry together.

This is a fairly significant problem for a film that opens with them having a lot of sex as boyfriend and girlfriend and then revolves around them as a married couple who make a sex tape in an attempt to revive their relationship.

So, perversely, for a brief moment in the film when their marriage isn't working, you actually believe it because it seems this couple has no chemistry. This is the only time Segel and Diaz are perfect together in this film. The rest of the time, they go together like spikes and a jumping castle.

With no emotional connection between the lead pair, it's difficult to care about their predicament. The fact the film plays out predictably on its one-line premise - couple accidentally share sex tape and then try to retrieve it - means there is little in the way of dramatic tension to elevate the care factor.

The only thing that could save this film would be if it was really funny. Unfortunately it's not really funny.

On the one hand, Sex Tape wants to be a Judd Apatow comedy like This Is 40, offering a frank and occasionally non-PC look at family and married life. On the other hand, it wants to be an absurdly over-the-top comedy along the lines of There's Something About Mary.

Neither of these elements gel. One minute, we're supposed to be laughing at the supposedly universal problems facing a once-randy couple (with no chemistry) whose sex life has dried up like a water balloon in the desert. The next minute, there is a fight between a man and a guard dog, jokes about diarrhoea and epilepsy, and an interlude with a man who loves cocaine, paintings of himself starring in Disney movies, and the metal band Slayer.

All of these things I just mentioned make up a prolonged 15-minute segment in the film that is as boring as it is unfunny, and which appears to be in the movie simply because nothing much else happens and it would have struggled to reach a running time worthy of the term "feature film".

There are a couple of laughs - but only a couple - and they mostly come from Corddry and Kemper as the best friends of Diaz and Segel's couple. This entire movie would likely have been better if Corddry and Kemper swapped roles with Diaz and Segel. They have more chemistry and probably could have sold the switches in comedic tone better.

A better script would have helped. There are some very obvious improvisation bits that don't fit in and seem to have been included because no one could come up with any better jokes, or maybe the screenwriters didn't get much further than the one-line premise.

There's not much to recommend about this film, other than it might have made a great sitcom episode that only ran for 24 minutes.

Instead you have to put up with it for 94 minutes.