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Friends with Benefits



Review by Anthony Morris

friends with benefits

Friends with Benefits

friends with benefits

Someone really needs to make a movie about the adventures of that one amazing bedsheet Hollywood puts in every single romantic comedy.

It's the one with the supernatural power to somehow cover up all the good stuff and get wedged between two people who are having sex and yet somehow it never actually detracts from the characters ability to have sex.

And if that movie ever gets made, Friends with Benefits will be the scene everyone ends up talking about, because that sheet gets a serious workout here.

Aside from being increasingly funny to spot how it's all bunched up between two people who have supposedly just had sex, it's also a pretty good symbol of what's wrong with this somewhat likable but flawed rom-com : while it wants to be up front about relationships and what actually takes place between two people without the usual rom-com clichés, in the end it just can't bring itself to get naked with the truth.

Free-wheeling but slightly scatty website designer Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and hard-headed corporate head-hunter Jamie (Mila Kunis) are both fresh out of failed relationships when they meet, become friends, and decide to add sex to the mix.

Things won’t get weird, will they? Oh God, they're getting weird.

This starts off openly mocking the conventions of traditional romantic comedies – especially the emotive music – and peaks with a flat-out as-seen-on-tv parody of rom-coms (starring Jason Segal and Rashida Jones) but then can't figure out a way to keep up the meta-commentary and still deliver the traditional rom-com ending so by the conclusion it's as bog-standard as the Katherine Hiegl films it was making fun of.

Fortunately, Timberlake and Kunis are both likable and funny as characters who aren’t so much definitely single and healed by love as they are just people trying to take a break from the tangles of relationships for a while.

This is like going to a bad restaurant with good friends; if you focus on the people, you might not notice just how bad everything else is.

3.5 out of 5


Friends with Benefits
Australian release: 18th August, 2011
Official Site: Friends with Benefits
Cast: Mila Kunis, Justin Timberlake and Patricia Clarkson.
Director: Will Gluck



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