Advertisement

Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

No Strings Attached

NO STRINGS ATTACHED (Ivan Reitman). Opens Friday (January 21). 110 minutes. For venues, trailers and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


For a movie about people who have a great deal of sex, No Strings Attached is awfully frustrating. It wrangles some very appealing actors, gives them some potentially entertaining things to do and proceeds to play everything out well beyond the point of exhaustion.

The concept is simple enough. Attractive singletons Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman fall into bed with each other and then decide to keep things strictly sexual. Well, she makes the decision, claiming she’s not good at the dating thing. And he goes along with it because he’sthe nicest guy in the world and is convinced he can eventually wear her down.

It’s not a bad idea. In fact, Elizabeth Meriwether’s screenplay is a novel reversal of Nora Ephron’s script for When Harry Met Sally, with Kutcher and Portman refusing to let their feelings get in the way of their boinking. But Meriwether hasn’t bothered to give her characters the intellectual and emotional synchronicity that made Ephron’s story so endearing.

Portman’s Emma is flirty and self-mocking in one scene, borderline sociopathic in the next. Kutcher’s Adam is alternately a doormat and an extrovert, depending on the needs of the scene. Both actors are capable of selling complex characters, but these aren’t complex characters they’re barely characters at all.

Worse, despite the great visual potential in pairing the wee Portman with the towering Kutcher (“When we stand next to each other, it looks like he’s kidnapping me”), the actors have no chemistry, making their coyly photographed love scenes airless and artificial.

On the plus side, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Greta Gerwig, Mindy Kaling and Jake Johnson do a fine job of filling out their secondary roles. Kline and Bell get a little more time than the rest, and make the most of it.

Director Ivan Reitman maintains a pleasantly casual vibe in which little jokes can bubble up from the sidelines, but he never quite gets around the lack of chemistry between his stars or the hole in the story’s heart.

normw@nowtoronto.com

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted