Rude, but good hearted

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2011)

Executive Recruitment Consultant Jamie (Mila Kunis) lures designer Dylan (Justin Timberlake) to New York, and they become easy friends. Both have just been dumped and so they decide that it would be a good idea, given that they both miss sex, if they start having sex on a "no strings" basis. Despite a promising start, it all goes pear-shaped.
Boy meets girl, audience can see they are a perfect match, all goes well, something gums up the works, last act solves the problem and resolves the relationship. The rules of the romcom are so fundamental that to breach them would probably result in the earth tipping off its axis or something equally apocalyptic. Fortunately, Friends With Benefits takes no such risks, treading very nearly the exact same course as No Strings Attached from about 6 months ago (Hollywood turning out 2 films about the same thing at nearly the same time - fancy that. Who'd have thought?).
So we have an unoriginal romcom. What else do we have? We have a surprisingly small amount of bad language, most of which comes from Emma Stone's short and very funny cameo within the first 5 minutes). We have quite a lot of sexual talk, sexual activity, and nudity although, since this is Hollywood, the talk can be as frank as you like (and it is fairly frank), but the sexual activity and nudity are absolutely non-explicit - lots of underwear, bare bums but no bits, and lots of Hollywood sheets covering up anything interesting.
Importantly, though, we have engaging people who we care about (with very good performances from both Timberlake, in his first primary role and Kunis, doing as good a cute-and-sexy as I've ever seen), we have an entertaining and intelligent script (hooray!), we have secondary characters and situations who add to the main story rather than detract, and we have heart.
I really enjoyed this.