No Strings Attached (2011) - Natalie Portman Turns Me On...Sort of!

Rating: 4/10 (7 February 2012)

A lot of people may know that the raunchy "friends having sex" comedy, "Friends with Benefits", with Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is actually a lot similar to a movie released months before called "No Strings Attached", with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. But trust me, you would rather see "Friends with Benefits". Yes, it's touching at times, and there are few funny chuckles. But this movie just defines the phrase "romantic comedy" in a very "not so good" way. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher star as Emma and Adam, two "friends with benefits" who have a sexual relationship, and they make sure to not crush on each other. Portman is lovely, but she makes me lose my last nerve with all of her complaining and all of her crankiness. I don't care if she's scared of commitment, so I just wish that she would just accept the commitment, and stop complaining about it already. Kutcher wasn't really that funny in this movie, and he only delivers a few chuckles. But he's still a pretty cool guy in this movie. It takes forever to get through this entire relationship. The sex scenes both start and end too quickly, and we are left with a boring remaining piece of the movie filled with cheesy clichés and loss of laughter. A fine actor that looks embarrassed to be in this mess is Kevin Kline, who plays Kutcher's father 'slash' former T.V. actor, a weed-smoking, body-building idiot who ends up hooking up with young, 20-year-old women. Oh, that's hilarious...not! This is a slow and cheesy romantic comedy without the heart, and without the laugh-out-loud laughs, when all we get are chuckles. When the movie tries to be heartwarming, it just leaves to be too predictable. Director Ivan Reitman should have known that this was not the right movie for him to be directing. Why should he waste his time on a useless sex comedy? I really thought that this movie was going to be okay, so I'm kind of disappointed. But everything from the useless sex scenes to the cheesy romance, I see this more as a drama, more than a romantic comedy. This movie has a great premise, but it's done in a weird point of view. Portman and Kutcher make good chemistry, but they mostly struggle during the sex scenes and emotional scenes. This movie really tried it's best to be a fun and entertaining film, but even if this movie didn't make me want to kill myself, or I wasn't thinking that I wanted to hate this movie with so much fury, it instead just made me say "no" to myself, and then I forgot about this movie in the next minute. "No Strings Attached", in my review, "a shamefully obnoxious sex comedy that drags".