Movie Review: Friends With Benefits (M18, 109min) | Rating: 4/5*
They'll show you a good time
LET'S be honest here. Even if you did unsuccessfully try to go all No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, you know you're not saying no to being Friends With Benefits with hot stuff Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.
Hollywood knows this, which is why it has no problem delivering the same story of two yuppie friends embarking on a sexual relationship free of commitment before succumbing to deeper emotions - twice in the same year.
The big difference is, this time around, there's actually that all important lightning-in-the-bottle: Chemistry between the leads.
Kunis is the emotionally damaged but feisty New Yorker who headhunts the emotionally unavailable but goofily charming Los Angeleno Timberlake, and ends up being "friends with benefits" after the requisite musical montage.
The pair glow in each other's presence, constantly igniting the other's performance, whether it is being comfortably naked in bed or flash-mobbing in the Big Apple. Their believable and palpable on-screen magnetism (which has sparked off many an off-screen rumour) is bolstered by strong support from Woody Harrelson, Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins who hilariously scene-steal even in their caricatured roles.
Some might take offence at how Friends With Benefits starts off mocking Tinseltown's most formulaic of romantic-comedies, only to do a 180-degree about-face and surrender to the genre's worst impulses for that "happily ever after" ending.
But the film gets away with its double standards thanks to its attractive leads and the unapologetically sassy direction of Easy A's Will Gluck. Armed with an almost too quick-witted script co-written by him, Gluck's natural touch for contrivance, hyperactive pacing and deft post-modern handling repackages FWB as this millennium's rom-com so very gleefully and unabashedly. Most importantly, every time Friends With Benefits teeters on the brink of cliche death, it manages to pull back and save itself from genre hell.
Like all the raunchy innuendos the term suggests, Friends With Benefits is most definitely a movie that badly wants it all ways. But let's face it: Despite our very vocal qualms about the genre, we all go to the movies for that slice of escapist fairy tale.
Friends With Benefits may become the very by-the-numbers romantic comedy it mocks, but this reviewer is never averse to love triumphing over cliche. And I'll watch it again just to prove it.
LET'S be honest here. Even if you did unsuccessfully try to go all No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, you know you're not saying no to being Friends With Benefits with hot stuff Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.
Hollywood knows this, which is why it has no problem delivering the same story of two yuppie friends embarking on a sexual relationship free of commitment before succumbing to deeper emotions - twice in the same year.
The big difference is, this time around, there's actually that all important lightning-in-the-bottle: Chemistry between the leads.
Kunis is the emotionally damaged but feisty New Yorker who headhunts the emotionally unavailable but goofily charming Los Angeleno Timberlake, and ends up being "friends with benefits" after the requisite musical montage.
The pair glow in each other's presence, constantly igniting the other's performance, whether it is being comfortably naked in bed or flash-mobbing in the Big Apple. Their believable and palpable on-screen magnetism (which has sparked off many an off-screen rumour) is bolstered by strong support from Woody Harrelson, Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins who hilariously scene-steal even in their caricatured roles.
Some might take offence at how Friends With Benefits starts off mocking Tinseltown's most formulaic of romantic-comedies, only to do a 180-degree about-face and surrender to the genre's worst impulses for that "happily ever after" ending.
But the film gets away with its double standards thanks to its attractive leads and the unapologetically sassy direction of Easy A's Will Gluck. Armed with an almost too quick-witted script co-written by him, Gluck's natural touch for contrivance, hyperactive pacing and deft post-modern handling repackages FWB as this millennium's rom-com so very gleefully and unabashedly. Most importantly, every time Friends With Benefits teeters on the brink of cliche death, it manages to pull back and save itself from genre hell.
Like all the raunchy innuendos the term suggests, Friends With Benefits is most definitely a movie that badly wants it all ways. But let's face it: Despite our very vocal qualms about the genre, we all go to the movies for that slice of escapist fairy tale.
Friends With Benefits may become the very by-the-numbers romantic comedy it mocks, but this reviewer is never averse to love triumphing over cliche. And I'll watch it again just to prove it.