Entertainment
Ultra-Raunchy Cameron Diaz Comedy Couldn’t Be Made Today For The Dumbest Reason
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
In the last decade, we went from multiple raunch comedies hitting theaters every year to nearly zero. One of the last of the mainstream raunch comedy releases, 2014’s Sex Tape starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, was a small hit, but its premise could only have supported a film in 2014 when the general public didn’t know what “the cloud” was or how it worked. A few years later, Apple’s iCloud became a common, everyday feature for users, who now understood that the entire plot of the film made no sense.
Sex Tape Has No Idea How Technology Works
In Sex Tape, Diaz and Segel play a married couple, Anne and Jay Hargrove, trying to rediscover the spark that they once had when the kids are away for a night. With nothing else working, they let their intrusive thoughts win and decide to film a sex tape. The problem is that instead of deleting the next day, Segal’s hapless Jay realizes it’s been uploaded to the cloud and shared with the iPads he gave away for Christmas. And yes, they are not only called iPads, but they are constantly shown on screen in the oddest product placement you can imagine.
Jay and Annie head out to recover all of the iPads and delete the video before anyone can see the sex tape. This involves committing breaking and entering, battling a German shepherd, accidentally doing a rail of cocaine, and getting busted by their best friends, played by Ellie Kemper and Rob Corddry, a pairing that, in a just world, would have headlined their own rom-com by now. The thing is, in reality, videos aren’t sent to iPads through the Cloud unless you specifically set up a shared file, then download them on each and every iPad. The entire plot could be resolved with one five-second act of deleting a file.
Sex Tape relies entirely on the comedic chemistry of Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, who reunite after knocking it out of the park with Bad Teacher. The physical comedy and one-liners are so few and far between that it’s one of those movies where you see everything in the trailer. Everyone involved has been in better, funnier films, but in the 12 years since Sex Tape’s release and the complete collapse of the rom-com industrial complex, it now looks like a masterpiece.
Sex Tape Hastened The End Of Rom-Coms
Bad Teacher set off the last gasp of rom-com relevance thanks to great reviews and a huge box office haul, while Sex Tape approached rock bottom with a 16 percent critical rating and a 33 percent audience rating. At the box office, it made three times its estimated budget with $120 million, but again, that doesn’t take into account the large marketing budget from attempting to turn the two leads into a Julia Roberts and Richard Gere for a new generation.
This decade, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell had a little success with a rom-com, Jeniffer Lauirence crashed and burned in her attempt, while the time-loop rom-com Palm Springs, starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, has been the most creative entry in the genre in decades. By comparison, Sex Tape hinges on a plot that’s both out of date and, given the Cloud’s common knowledge, makes zero sense. You can do better by watching Bad Teacher or Palm Springs again, then spending your time watching Sex Tape.