Monday, Sep. 21, 2009

'Jennifer's Body' weirdly ambitious

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Just a heads-up, but Jennifer's Body is the most misleading name I've run into since finding out the Chicago Bears are played by humans.

-- Times, trailer, theaters.

As background, Jennifer's Body stars Megan Fox, who's widely perceived as the hottest woman alive right now. As conclusive evidence in favor of this perception, Fox is so hot there's an active countermovement that dedicates their precious time to arguing she's not actually as hot as everyone else says. This is a lost cause, gentlemen. Give it up and let's get back to the real issues, such as exactly which season of The Simpsons stopped being funny.

How much, then, of Fox's body do we actually get to see? Damned little. A distant skinny-dipping scene that is no doubt a body double, then a bare back that might be hers, but there's a reason it's called a back and not a forward. With that one huge complaint out of the way, I'll now officially go on record saying Jennifer's Body was much better than I expected.

Amanda Seyfried isn't that cool. Megan Fox is. They're best friends at their small-town high school, but that power/popularity imbalance means when Fox says they're going to see a minor indie band at a local bar, they will go to see that band.

During the show, the bar burns down. Fox is abducted by the band. When she comes back, it's as a literal boy-eating monster who requires human flesh and blood to keep herself alive.

This might be the low expectations talking, but it wasn't half bad. I was rough on writer Diablo Cody's Juno because it was so in love with its own slang-laden, jeans-burstingly hip dialogue it suffocated all the good lines under a pillow of hot resentment.

With Jennifer's Body, Cody reels the writing in a little, and though it's still got a few lines that are too clever for their own good, the overall restraint makes it possible to enjoy the lines that deserve it.

Hilarious? No, but decently funny, especially if you can overlook the remaining cool-cool signifiers (the guy with a hook hand, the ridiculous lesbian makeout session, and the greatest crime of all, the continued employment of actor's overactor Amy Sedaris).

"Restraint" is hardly the word I'd use to describe the rest of it, wherein a chick who's so sexy she's paid millions of dollars just to stand around being sexy becomes a flesh-eating demon who lures men to their deaths by making them think she'll get naked with them.

Call it a horror-comedy, then, like Shaun of the Dead or Slither--or more accurately, like one of the horror-comedies you haven't heard of because they're not terribly special. Both of those movies we have heard of are subgenre classics because they function just as well as horror films as they do comedies.

Jennifer's Body doesn't excel on the horror side. Its concept is funny (especially the specifics of the indie band's involvement), but it's also pretty lazy. The details of Fox's monstrous existence aren't much developed and the way Seyfried exposes her doesn't involve any subtle deductions or crafty plotting, it involves going to a library and reading a lot of books, which is almost as boring in a movie as it is in real life.

That's fun enough, in a silly way, it's just not all that satisfying. All of Jennifer's Body is weirdly ambitious — on top of the cross-genre thing, it also seems to be trying to say something about friendship and pop culture — and it's a minor miracle it's not a colossal, confused mess. Instead, it falls into that tricky gray area where I can't quite recommend it yet didn't mind when it was on.

Grade: B-