Pointless And Very Predictable

Rating: 3/10 (29 July 2012)

I will give this movie credit for this: it did actually make me chuckle a few times. There are some amusing moments in it as Emma and Adam (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) try to sort out their relationship. Having met as teenagers at a camp, they've reconnected as adults and become "friends with benefits" - a euphemism, of course, for two people having sex with each other without any commitment. It's hardly an earth shaking premise. It is very much about sex, sex and more sex, and it's very predictable. You know that eventually these two are going to fall for each other in spite of their "no commitment" commitment, and you guess that in some way they're going to overcome all the obstacles and end up together. So the few chuckles that I did get out of this were very necessary to make the movie bearable.
One extra point for it is that there is a twist in this. It's not Emma who falls for Adam; it's Adam who falls for Emma and Emma who tries to brush him off at first. That's a gender role reversal, of course, which I guess also gave this a little bit of flavour that it wouldn't otherwise have had. On the downside, it's burdened with characters (mostly the secondary one but also Emma and Adam to an extent) that you really have trouble caring about. Sure I wanted the two of them to get together, but that was mostly because it would signal the end of the movie. (3/10)