Friends with Benefits [Review by Haus]

Remember those old posters in your middle school science lab that read “What in the world isn’t chemistry?” Well, I finally have an answer. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in Friends with Benefits.

We saw this tonight. Parsi spent the day telling anyone who would listen that I had in effect pre-written my review — “it’s No Strings Attached but Mila Kunis is super hot.” That’s the review he foretold.

Granted, the comparison with No Strings Attached seems to have escaped nobody at all. It’s 2011’s manifestation of identical-movie-madness — think Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998; Mission to Mars and Red Planet in 2000; The Illusionist and The Prestige in 2006. (Armed with these I found a more extensive list still.) Yes, the two are in all important respects the same film, as everyone made sure to tell me today. (I don’t mind. If not for Parsi’s regular broadcasting of his pre-emptive castigation and the sympathetic comments I receive in return, it’s possible no one would speak to me at all.)

With Will Gluck in the wheelhouse — he directed Easy A — I was hopeful. But while Easy A coasted on the charisma of its lovely star Emma Stone, Friends with Benefits does precisely the opposite and grinds on several occasions to a painful halt. Not only can these leads not fake falling in love, they can’t even fake basic sexual attraction.

Timberlake plays a graphic designer/layout artist type who’s poached by headhunter Kunis and flown to New York to interview for a high-level job at GQ Magazine. Along the way the two become friends (we’re told — their “friendly” banter is painfully flat) as each bemoans their respective history of romantic strike-outs and general emotional unavailability. Cue music (more on this later) and into one another’s arms they fall. I can’t even remember the specifics of their “Do you wanna do this? You know, use each other for sex?” conversation because it was done so much better in No Strings Attached. (Notwithstanding the important difference that Ashton Kutcher wasn’t hand-cast from resin and Natalie Portman had a pulse.)

Poor Mila Kunis (who, it’s true, I very nearly fell in love with in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) has nothing to work with here. Timberlake somehow manages to be even flatter than he was in Bad Teacher — in which, if you recall, he played a creepy awkward trust fund baby — and traipses through scene after scene in a sort of cardboard Novocaine daze. He perks up a little toward the end, as does Kunis, but by then it’s too late. Perhaps director Gluck believed the best way to highlight the fact that these two weren’t in love early on was to drain all the blood from their interactions. Wrong move. Friends with benefits (the real cultural phenomenon, mind you, not the film) are friends first, benefits later. That means quick, casual, easy banter. They’re comfortable together, at ease. These two couldn’t be less at ease. And I’ve seen more dramatic response from the wrong end of a pistol range.

Too bad, because the opening is absolutely hilarious — this rapid-fire comedic gold sets a high bar which sadly tumbles the second Timberlake gets to New York. (And Woody Allen does a better job selling that city in five seconds than this film does in ten painful minutes.)

I’ll say this though – it does get better. Some choice lines are drizzled throughout; Woody Harrelson offers fleeting relief as Timberlake’s hyper-gay coworker, and Jenna Elfman is fun to watch as his sister. Toward the end the picture picks up steam a little, and dives deeper into the situation than I expected. Family members (and their views) figure fairly prominently, which is a welcome change from No Strings Attached.

But Friends with Bennies also strangely tries to be meta — you know, like the Scream films — sprinkling cutesy references to rom-com tropes and helpfully showing snippets of a romantic film-within-a-film (the latter pleasantly overdone by Jason Segel — who served mainly to remind me of how much better Kunis was with him). Another example: Kunis and Timberlake joke that the music in romantic comedies “tells you how to feel” in each particular scene. True enough, but this satirical angle might perhaps work a little better if this film didn’t then do precisely the thing it makes fun of. Really. Again and again, and seemingly without irony. Either this is some serious David Lynch sauce, or the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. I’ve placed my chips.

It’s also oh so hip — all iPads and flash mobs and YouTube, with a strange harping on ditch-in-the-Hudson hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger. This play for the zeitgeist works if you care about that sort of thing, but it seems a tad desperate and doubtless won’t age well. The film also throws down some strange back-story late in act two — largely centering around family medical conditions. These are evidently meant to add emotional depth to Timberlake’s character, but they come off a bit callous and I didn’t much like them.

It’s hard to compare this with No Strings without diving deep into spoiler land, so suffice it to say that whereas No Strings comes out fairly well — the ending is organic and sort of blooms from the characters’ relationship — here the inevitable conclusion feels just as forced as anything else. Put differently, Natalie Portman makes me want to have a friend with benefits and fall in love with her. Kunis — and I can hardly believe I’m saying this — does not.

So that’s that. In all, it’s not a terrible film. It sure seems like it will be, about 20 minutes in, but it sorts itself out a little. It is essentially the same story as No Strings Attached, though it takes a slightly different pass at it (and I do mean slightly — the two really are surprisingly similar).

An important difference: No Strings Attached is in RedBox now for a buck a night. This is in your theater for ten. An easy call, really.

HAUS VERDICT: Strange pseudo-meta rom-com rip-off that’s totally devoid of romantic chemistry. Not terrible, but it’s been done better before. Like, literally a few months before. 

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s Review.