Friends with Benefits

I kept on waiting for Friends with Benefits to go off the beaten path of romantic comedies, and surprise me. Unfortunately, the movie chose to stay on autopilot its entire running time, and remain lockstep in lowered expectations. Don't get me wrong, the movie is agreeable enough, thanks mostly to its stars, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. But not even their chemistry can rise above the fact that we've seen this movie way too many times before.

The film is directed and co-written by Will Gluck, a man who made his directorial debut two years ago with the abysmal Fired Up, one of the worst comedies of 2009. He bounced back nicely a year later by directing Easy A, one of the better comedies of 2010. Friends with Benefits finds him strictly on the middle ground. The movie is harmless and amusing in parts, but refuses to stand out. It's the second romantic comedy this year that asks if people can have a relationship built around sex, but not love. The other film was No Strings Attached, which starred Ashton Kutcher and Kunis' Black Swan co-star, Natalie Portman. I didn't care much for that film, and this one is only marginally better. This movie at least has kind of a cute central premise - Two people who are tired of the cliches of Hollywood romantic comedies find themselves in the middle of one in their real lives. But the script isn't clever enough to have fun with this idea. Instead of playing with the conventions and cliches of the genre, it follows them right off the cliff to mediocrity.

As the movie opens, we meet Dylan (Timberlake) and Jamie (Kunis) as their latest relationships have just bombed out. They both decide to swear off love right about the same time they meet. He's the head of a popular web site out of L.A., and she's a powerful executive recruiter who invites him out to New York, hoping to convince him to take a high level job working for G.Q. magazine. He takes the job after Jamie gives him a whirlwind tour of the city, which plays less like a scene from the movie, and more like a very long ad promoting New York tourism. Not long after Dylan takes the job, they start hanging out as friends. This is not surprising, since working at G.Q. is apparently very lonely, as the only other person Dylan has contact with at work is the sports writer (Woody Harrelson), whose job in the screenplay is to remind us every chance he gets that his character is gay. The movie keeps on cutting back to this guy, making us think he'll play some part in the movie eventually, but no. He shows up, makes a joke about being gay, then disappears. It's too bad, because Harrelson is likable here. He's just stuck with a nothing character.

Back to Dylan and Jamie - One night, they're sitting on the couch, watching a cheesy romantic comedy on TV. This is a funny scene, with a movie-within-a-movie sequence featuring an uncredited Jason Segel as the star of the film, which expertly parodies a lot of the cliches of the genre while playing it straight. As they watch the film, Dylan and Jamie show their disdain for Hollywood's simple-minded perception of love and relationships. The topic soon turns to sex and their own relationships, which leads to them discussing the idea of them having sex together as friends, with no relationships or emotional attachments to come between them. The two act like this is an idea that has never been discussed before, but I digress. Before long, they're sleeping together. Not long after that, they're having physical sex.

It's about this point that Friends with Benefits goes on autopilot, and starts hitting all the expected marks. Jamie's going to start having serious thoughts about Dylan, only to have Dylan misread them. Dylan's going to take Jamie to his family home for the Fourth of July weekend, so that the rest of his family can misunderstand their relationship, especially when Dylan's snoopy sister (Jenna Elfman) sees him sneaking out of the bedroom late one night. Dylan is going to go too far to convince his sister that he's not in a serious relationship with Jamie and say some hurtful things about her, which of course Jamie just so happens to hear, because she's in the same room, and the other two don't know it. This is all time-tested stuff, and could still work if the script was smart enough to do anything with it. This script treats the material like a raunchy TV sitcom.

Timberlake and Kunis are at least good together, and are brighter than the material they've been given. They play off each other well, and get some laughs, but their best efforts can't rise above the mediocre plot they're in. There are some supporting roles for Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins, as Jamie's mother and Dylan's father respectively, but they are both poorly used. Clarkson never registers as a real presence in the movie, just showing up from time to time to talk to her daughter. As for Jenkins, his character is suffering from a very convenient form of Alzheimer's that allows him to be sad and sympathetic most of the time, yet the disease seems to lift whenever the script finds it convenient, and he has to give a pep talk to his son about finding love. He too never registers as a real character, and mainly exists for a running gag where he's constantly found in public not wearing pants.

Friends with Benefits is really not that bad of a movie, it just suffers from a very bland feel of something we've seen before, and the film has no intention of surprising us, other than some occasional snappy dialogue exchanges. There are some fleeting moments of wit throughout, but then the movie decides to settle right back into the norm. If there's ever a movie that could have benefited more from going off the beaten path, it's this one.

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