Sex Tape - film review: 'Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel don't click'

In Cameron Diaz’s topical new romantic comedy, a couple film themselves having sex and the resulting footage ends up in the iCloud
Exposure: Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel in Sex Tape
Charlotte O'Sullivan5 September 2014

Could Cameron Diaz’s new romantic comedy be any more topical? Annie and Jay (Diaz and Jason Segel), an American couple with two children, use an iPad to film themselves having sex which, because they have no idea about the ins and outs of the iCloud, turns out to be a mistake.

Annie is horrified by the exposure that follows (“This is way worse for me, no one looks at the man!”). Even Jay, though, wants his privacy back. In seeking to be up to the minute and saucy, the pair have turned themselves into “wank material” and opened themselves up to bribery. Worse, they risk becoming the butt of everyone’s jokes.

Does it matter that the film itself ain’t that funny? Annie and Jay are mostly anodyne; Diaz and Segel really don’t click. The film is stolen from under their noses by Rob Lowe and Jack Black, playing successful entrepreneurs who — simply because they seem based on real people rather than types — end up having the last word.

Lowe is a lonely, hypocritical coke-head whose mansion is full of Disney tableaux into which he’s spookily inserted his grinning head. It’s a fantastic, wonderfully self-reflexive turn.

Black, meanwhile, is the sweaty, paranoid owner of a user-submitted porn site. Why do so many couples want to catch themselves in the act? The answer, according to Black’s character, is boredom. Maybe he’s right.

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