Movie Review: Friends with Benefits

I hate this “movie” which is really just an excuse to make money on top of money. First they make money by selling tickets to people but also the film practically pays for itself by some of the most obvious product placement I’ve ever seen in a major film. Justin Timberlake’s “character” in this extended commercial is an art director for GQ (product placement 1) and that’s a real great job for him to constantly be surrounded by ads for different companies. About once every five minutes, a lead character references a product positively or disses another product negatively–another way to product place is to talk about how shitty T-Mobile is, thus good for Verizon–or just has a big fucking poster for a vodka company lingering in the background. Towards the end of the movie there is a character actually discussing the benefits of using Amazon, and saying anyone who pays full price for a book at Barnes and Noble is an idiot and at that point, I really turned on a film I already hated.

What Works: The always great Richard Jenkins isn’t half bad as Timberlake’s dad. He strikes a chord of genuine emotion where everyone else is content to ham their way through a movie that also wants you to notice how clever it is by drawing attention to its cliches, well it ain’t clever.

What Doesn’t Work: The trying-to-have-it-both-ways mentality I just mentioned. The movie wants to act superior to typical romantic comedies by pointing out their cliches…and then fall right into their cliches without coming up with a single scene that’s original (we’ve already seen the Fuck Buddies movie in No Strings Attached, a movie that already overdosed on smug back in January). This piece of shit is relentlessly cynical and more acidic than a battery, yet it also wants to charm us by being occasionally cutesy. And so this completes the transition we’ve seen for romantic comedies in the last five years. Where they used to be so sentimental it made you sick, now they’ve gone to the exact opposite end of the spectrum with preening smugness, the dialogue stitched together out of pop cultural references and a constant stream of sex talk…minus the actual part where we see nudity. It’s all sizzle and no steak.

And Justin Timberlake might be the most oppressively shallow actor on the face of the Earth. You see him in The Social Network or Bad Teacher or Friends with Benefits, and the whole time it’s the same guy…even if he’s supposed to be playing a cocky shark or a naive dork it just feels like a cartoon character brought to life.

What I Would Have Done Differently: If you’re really in the mood for punishing yourself with a smug, self-satisfied, “Just Sex” “romantic” “comedy” with a shallow leading actor, try No Strings Attached.