Friends With Benefits is annoying. Not just because it’s the 2nd film this year – after the amiable-enough No Strings Attached – about a fuck-buddy relationship complicated by the conflicting emotional demands of each party. And not just because its two leads (Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake) both have voices of paint-stripping timbre, and are placed in roles that require a lot of yelling at each other; whether they have chemistry starts to matter less than the unpleasantly prolonged aural assault that their pairing offers.
No, Friends With Benefits is largely irritating because of its off-the-charts smugness. Early on there’s a scene in which Kunis and Timberlake sit together watching a fake romcom on TV and mocking its cliches; all but winking at the audience who’ve opted for the raunchier and allegedly more ‘real’ alternative. Does it constitute hypocrisy or lame irony that the film eventually adopts all those cliches? From the insta-pathos of Timberlake’s dementia-addled dad (poor Richard Jenkins), to Woody Harrelson as Timberlake’s gay co-worker and advice-man, to the obvious body doubles during sex scenes followed by post-coital L-shaped sheets, to the third-act dissolve-heavy montages of each lead on their lonesome accompanied to Iron & Wine tunes (or soundalikes), to the Really Good Talk with a parent that solves everything, etc etc…
All the aforementioned would be forgivable if the film was funny, but the screenplay’s attempts at rat-a-tat verbal ping-pong matches don’t recall His Girl Friday/Bringing Up Baby so much as a cast forced to speed-read from a snarky ‘love & relationships’ blog off of a nearby teleprompter in unison. Friendly, or beneficial, this film is not.
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Cowboys and Aliens: The title practically sneers at you for resisting the promise of a zany mashup of two matinee staples (even as wicka wicka Wild West West sounds off in the back of your head like a warning siren). It’s something like an acknowledgement that the mass appeal of any Hollywood product lies largely in the delivery of a few sure-fire ingredients for success; sorta like a hypothetical Transformers sequel titled Explosions and Tits. Which is to say that anyone buying a ticket to Cowboys & Aliens is expecting a smart-stupid, tongue-in-cheek, Snakes on a Plane-lite sorta thing.
So it’s perplexing that the film is actually such a drab slog, and completely devoid of Iron Man director Jon Favreau’s customary light touch. The problems start with the casting of Daniel Craig, playing a gunslinger who arrives as a memory-deprived mysterious stranger in a small county, only to gradually recall the abduction of his wife by the titular extraterrestrials. Craig is a fine actor in other things, but he offers as much levity here as a stampede, and his cowboy hat always manages to look crudely photoshopped above his head. In addition to that, he’s saddled with an underwritten love interest (Olivia Wilde), who together, generate all the chemistry of Madame Tussaud sculptures knocking into each other.
The irony of Cowboys & Aliens is that though it stagnates when the aliens arrive for a showdown, Favreau begins the film as a reasonably convincing straight-up western, with Harrison Ford doing a pretty decent audition for a gruff colonel in a more solemn, back-to-basics take on the genre. Mostly though, it vaporises while you watch it.
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