What does it say about Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape (rated R), billed as a racy sex comedy, that the funniest running joke involves Rob Lowe’s face painted into the scenes of classic moments in Disney animation? Lowe has a supporting role – more of an extended cameo, really – as Hank, the eccentric billionaire patriarch of a company that aims to buy the wholesome “mommy blog” written by Annie (Cameron Diaz), despite the fact that the only post we see her write addresses her fascination with her husband’s erections.
More on Hank in a minute – first, let’s focus on Annie and her husband Jay (Jason Segel). They met 10 years earlier in college and defined their relationship from day one on the frequency and intensity of their bow-chicka-wow-wow moments. Now married with two young children, they can barely stay awake long enough to shower, let alone enjoy a communal lather. One night Annie has the idea to spend the evening with Jay, filming themselves as they re-create every position from The Joy of Sex. Three hours later, all that expended energy has likely ruined the couch cushions, while creating a massive MP4 file on Jay’s iPad that will come back to haunt them.
One has to wonder whether Apple’s product placement executives knew what they were doing when they wrote a presumably hefty check in exchange for the repeated promotional references invoked by Jay and Annie in Sex Tape. Jay buys iPads in bulk for his job – he does something with a radio station that involves designing his own playlists and going to rock concerts – and gives the old ones away to friends, neighbors and mailmen when he’s done with them. He loves his iPads, but doesn’t know how to use them; and so when their marathon home video is accidentally synced to every iPad he’s ever owned, his solution is quaintly analog: They have to get the computers back.
The bulk of the film takes place over a long, long night, ending with Jay and Annie breaking into the server farm of the adult-movie website where their film has been uploaded. (Good thing the site was headquartered within a short drive of their home, I guess, and not, say, China.) There they meet a porn king played by a surprise guest star, who offers some sage advice about sex and marriage. First, though, they head to Hank’s house, for the film’s comic centerpiece: He got one of the iPads too, and while Jay looks around the guy’s mansion for it he spots commissioned pieces of Hank in The Lion King, Hank in Pinocchio, etc.. Meanwhile, clean-cut Hank is blasting thrash-metal tunes downstairs and offering Annie cocaine – it’s what friends do.
Sex Tape is a dirty comedy with a big heart, which would be great if director Kasdan knew how to knit those two ideas together. He doesn’t, and the result is weirdly disjointed – a self-conscious collection of F bombs and butt shots (generously distributed between both stars) interspersed with family homilies and the suburban-underworld shock comedy of older, better films like Adventures in Babysitting and After Hours. It lacks the raucous commitment to lunacy that distinguished Neighbors from earlier this summer, and it’s not sexy enough to titillate. For that brief sequence with Hank, everything works: Lowe takes charge with a blast of surreal, zany energy that injects the film with much-needed comic tension. But as I’ve said a million times, we can’t stay in Rob Lowe’s house forever.
(IMAGE: Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz in Sex Tape. Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures.)