One of the nice things about living under an overpass is you get first look at all the new movie billboards.
I don't even need an alarm clock! It's pretty hard to miss those big trucks hauling in the new ads when you have no walls. You want to talk about your free entertainment, there's nothing better than spending the six weeks until they take it down sitting in the dirt and laughing at what a stupid movie the thing they are advertising is bound to be.
No Strings Attached, a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher! As if I would ever watch that. I would seek gainful employment before paying to see that obvious bomb of awful.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Or so I thought until I found out nothing else was releasing in the Tri-Cities this week. Then I became sad. Then I went to see No Strings Attached, because that's what heroes do. At last, confusion set in: hey wait, this movie is kind of good?
When Ashton Kutcher finds out his ex-girlfriend is dating his dad Kevin Kline, Kutcher drunkenly calls every girl he knows looking for a one-night stand. He wakes in the apartment of Natalie Portman, a woman he's met just a handful of times.
They didn't have sex the night before -- but they do in the morning. With Portman disinterested in pursuing things further, Kutcher has to settle for a no-strings arrangement. If he so much as hints at wanting something more, Portman will be out the door.
Which is less likely? If the sun rose in the west, then descended to serve you coffee and breakfast in bed? Or if Ashton Kutcher were involved in a good movie? (Exception made, of course, for Dude, Where's My Car?. Which looked idiotic, and was, but in the best possible way.) Well, I hope you like your coffee served at two million degrees, because No Strings Attached is quite watchable.
Not that it's flawless. In any movie about a friends with benefits relationship, you can guess right now how the entire plot plays out. Come on, go ahead. What? No, an increasingly love-mad Kutcher doesn't fling Portman out a 20-story window and then ride a unicycle to a whorehouse. What were you...oh, forget it.
Other aspects of Elizabeth Meriwether's script fare better. Sure, much of the secondary characters' dialogue feels like it was lifted from the cutting room floor of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but it's the stuff that could have made it. Seriously, it's pretty funny, often vulgar without being crass. Though there's a lot of situational comedy, it isn't overly broad -- when they meet in college, Portman invites Kutcher out to a vague event; he shows up in bright school colors to her father's funeral.
Credit for making good with that material is due to director Ivan Reitman, the guy who made Ghostbusters and several other less awesome comedies, such as Ghostbusters 2. And Evolution. You know what wasn't a good movie? Evolution.
Here, he gets some nice performances out of Kutcher and Portman, whose characters could have easily come off as types. Portman doing good, that I can believe. Kutcher? That's like leaving for work and coming home to find the dishes have come alive, washed themselves and converted that broken TV into a functional still.
Right then: No Strings Attached is somewhat conventional and predictable. It's not going to revolutionize the way we think about emotionless boning. But it is funny, unmanipulative, and more honest than your average romantic comedy. Color me surprised.
Grade: B
