About.com Rating

In Sex Tape, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz play long-married Jay and Annie, who met in college in a fleshy flurry but are now married with two kids, so busy with drop-offs and errands and work that they have no time to make the beast with two backs, never mind the energy. Stymied by sameness, Annie has an idea: Liven up their love life by not only going through every position in The Joy of Sex, but, also, filming it for their own edification and enjoyment.

After their frantic mission culminates in their drowsy dozing, Annie snoozily tells Jay to erase the recording. He of course does not. Worse, his habit of gifting iPads -- that automatically sync and download the awesome mixes he makes in his job at a radio station -- to friends, family and sundry others means that their private activities are now in public view, as they learn when a mystery text-er sends a fan note. ...

The set-up, of course, is utter nonsense, requiring more contortions and stretches than the Kama Sutra -- and yet that slender start is enough to kick off Sex Tape's comedy, which isn't crafted to create weary titters of smuttiness and shame but, rather, as something smarter and better and funnier. As Jay and Annie try to recover and erase the scattered iPads, the film essentially takes on the shape and style of a door-slamming farce, one where a McGuffin must be obtained and a reputation must be maintained. Directed by Jake Kasdan, who's proven himself a purveyor of agreeable comedy with films like Bad Teacher and TV programs like New Girl, Sex Tape's many-hands script is credited to Kate Angelo, with Segel and Nicholas Stoller credited; the film also clearly contains many (funny) clearly improvised bits as well.

And perhaps the best thing about Sex Tape is that it never gets icky or squicky or squeamish; Sex Tape, unlike most American comedies, talks about sex as if it were something two consenting adults might enjoy as part of their committed relationship, not just a source of humiliation-based 'humor' and cringe-based 'comedy.' You buy Annie and Jay's relationship, and you get  that they're two loving people who don't quite know how to reconnect; you also get that their desperate mission brings back some of what they've been missing.

A comedy is often only as good as its supporting cast, so let it be noted that Rob Corddry and Elle Kemper are great as Annie and Jay's similarly-married best friends, who eagerly join in the quest to recapture the iPads; Rob Lowe, playing a business maven who may  be about to hire Annie is also great, if a little too close to his Parks and Rec work as Chris Trager; Harrison Holzer is terrific as Kemper and Corddry's son Howard. And a cameo-ing star's performance as a familyman and pornographer is brief, bizarre and great. Still, a lot of the film hinges on the chemistry between Segel and Diaz, and they have it; they collaborate easily, riff with each other well and make sense as a couple with real feelings, real concerns, real problems and real love under everything. (In another smart touch, we never see any actual pornography in Sex Tape, and thank God; the clammy, sweaty-biology-class-meets-misogynist-industrial-film nature of most modern porn would have killed the comedy dead.)

Sex Tape does deliver plenty of laughs and no small amount of smartness within its brisk running time, along with some clever screenwriting, skillful direction and well-defined characters. Even if it isn't so astonishingly good that you'll want to immediately rewind, recover and watch it again, in the wake of Blended, Tammy, Think Like a Man Too and The Other Woman, at this point in the summer of 2014, "it could have been much, much worse" sounds remarkably like high praise.