6) TIE: Sex Tape and The Other Woman
[I decided to group this pair of wretched misfires based on two key similarities: both represent romantic comedy writing at its most utterly loathsome, and both feature a terrible performance from Cameron Diaz (look out for the star elsewhere on this list – boy, if any awards category is a sure thing, it’s her for a Razzie). Let’s take them one at a time.]
Sex Tape
I know, I know – it’s right in the title. But just because Sex Tape, in which a married couple scrambles to retrieve accidentally shared copies of an intimate video, is straightforward about its innate smuttiness, that shouldn’t have meant it had to be this bad. Where does it go wrong?
For starters, it’s less erotic than an Adam Sandler comedy, a major problem when you consider that director Jake Kasdan had Cameron Diaz at his disposal. This is the woman who HAD SEX WITH A CAR last year in The Counselor – and made it sexy, too – for crying out loud. So it feels like a miscalculation that a movie called Sex Tape only focuses on the funny (or lack thereof) that takes place during the filmed night of bumping uglies between married couple Annie (Diaz) and Jay (Jason Segel).
Perhaps the decision would have worked if the script ever displayed an iota of humor. None of that either. Instead, Sex Tape lurches from scene to scene, ditching jokes before it can even set them up in a desperate attempt to earn some meager laughs from less-demanding audience members. It doesn’t work at all, and even when Sex Tape doesn’t fall flat on its face, the jokes are of the bottom-of-the-barrel variety.
A skeletal Jason Segel and a miscast Cameron Diaz dragging each other through a one-joke premise that’s been stretched to a still-overlong 94 minutes? That’s not comedy, that’s torture, for them and for us.
The Other Woman
The Other Woman earns particular dishonor for masking its ugly, regressive sexism behind a shiny veneer of peppy, go-get-em female empowerment. Diaz plays a supposedly high-powered working woman who, after discovering that her smooth customer boy toy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, crying out for help) is not only married (to an unnecessarily neurotic Leslie Mann) but also cheating a second time with an empty-headed stunner (Kate Upton, insultingly stereotyped as the blonde bimbo). Ugh.
The Other Woman is the type of movie that Hollywood shouldn’t be able to get away with making anymore. Aside from being unfunny and riddled with plot holes, it’s just grotesquely offensive to women. Even its basic, Bechdel test-failing premise – that three women discover that they’ve been cheated on and spend the next few weeks doing nothing other than spying on him and plotting their elaborate vengeance – should make alarm bells go off inside your head.
Director Nick Cassavetes doesn’t help matters by employing a glossy coating that just amplifies his film’s brutal stupidity. The Other Woman is like a parody of a Hollywood rom-com – or at least, I wish it were. That something so hollow and lacking in humanity made $196.5 million at the box office is more depressing and disturbing than a Lars von Trier marathon.