Jennifer’s Body

Rating

Director

Karyn Kusama

Screenplay

Diablo Cody

Length

102 min.

Starring

Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons, Adam Brody, Sal Cortez, Ryan Levine, Juan Riedinger, Colin Askey, Chris Pratt, Juno Ruddell, Kyle Gallner, Josh Emerson, J.K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris, Cynthia Stevenson

MPAA Rating

R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use.

Review

What do a spirited pregnant teen wrestling with putting up her child for adoption and a slutty high school girl turned psychotic vampire have in common? A screenwriter.

Diablo Cody made a name for herself when she wrote and won an Oscar for the screenplay of Jason Reitman’s film Juno. The film became a breakaway success earning four Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Her first big screen outing since winning the Oscar is an amalgam of genre cliches mixed with her own over-exaggerated teen-girl dialogue.

In her new film, Jennifer’s Body, Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox are almost your typical American teenagers. Fox plays Jennifer, a gorgeous cheerleader, and Seyfried plays Needy, a brainy social outcast. The only reason they are friends is that they grew up together. How did they turn out so different? That’s a conceit the screenplay deftly avoids. Instead, we’re further exposed to Cody’s must-be-patented banter like “You need a mani bad. You should find a Chinese chick to buff your situation.” When the style first showed up in Juno, audiences weren’t expecting it to be a theme of all of her productions, but just like it’s used frequently in Cody’s Showtime creation The United States of Tara, it also makes for some rather awkward moments in Jennifer’s Body.

Aside from the parlance, Jennifer’s Body has a semi-unique premise wrapped in painfully executed scenes of bloody horror and gratingly banal plot devices. There’s a small element of originality in Jennifer’s vampiristic inducement, but the circumstances are contrived, the progression is unrewarding and the finale is suspiciously anti-climactic.

Ms. Fox got into a lot of trouble recently for bashing the man who gave her her big break in Transformers. While many of us spend time lambasting him as a director, it’s verboten for people who are still working within the Hollywood system to do the same. With her performance in Jennfier’s Body, she has proven to no one that she can act. Barely passing for acting, Fox plays on her sexuality to distract everyone she can from the fact that she has no real talent. Perhaps there’s a strong actor hidden somewhere under that façade, but if there is, she’s doing a fantastic job keeping it hidden.

After her debut in the successful Mamma Mia!, one might expect Seyfried to have found more worthy projects. Instead, she’s traveling the irrelevance route involving herself with the likes of Jennifer’s Body and the upcoming Dear John, films that give her play with audiences, but do little to display confidence in her own acting ability.

If you’re looking for mindless horror entertainment, there are still better films out there to watch. Jennifer’s Body has claimed itself to be a serio-comic spoof of the horror genre, attempting to extract humor from its situations while being utterly devoted to its conventions. What’s funny to some isn’t funny to others and while films like Scream aren’t exactly comedy films at least those aren’t relying heavily on the hip factor to sell its wares. Even the true spoofs like Scary Movie have the ability to entertain the audience far more sufficiently than this hopelessly clueless flick.

Review Written

November 10, 2009