thoughts on Sex Tape (spoilers)

So...this was an awfully thin premise to base a movie around, and the only reason they're able to even get a whole movie out of this concept is that Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz's characters don't really understand how the Internet works, which doesn't make any sense, given that she is about to break a deal to become a professional blogger and he has some sort of DJ job that seems to involve uploading and sharing a crap ton of music.  Like, the events of this movie would have only been believable if we did not know that the two of them use the Internet all the time in their daily lives, and if perhaps the two were older and more out of touch.  Let's just get that out there right off the bat: the whole movie is based on a flawed and somewhat stupid premise, stretched out by having characters who seem relatively intelligent do stupid and unbelievable things.

Segel and Diaz star as Jay and Annie, a married couple with two elementary school-age children with cute old-timey names, Clive and Nell (played by Sebastian Hedges Thomas and Giselle Eisenberg, respectively).  They make a point early in the movie of letting us know that Clive is adept enough with technology that he has been put in charge of his fourth grade class's video yearbook, and also that he is, in Jay's words, kind of being a dick recently.  You would think that these two qualities-- his technology skills and his dickishness-- would allow him to eventually help his parents out, and that having a child help grown-ass adults out of a sex tape mess would be the kind of humor an R-rated comedy might go for. Spoiler alert: the movie doesn't go there.  The video yearbook eventually leads to some physical comedy when Jay jumps off a balcony to keep a child from accidentally playing the sex tape at a fourth grade graduation ceremony (I know; as one character points out, why the F if fourth grade graduation a thing?), but that's it. Missed opportunity, if you ask me, though it's hardly the movie's biggest problem.

Anyway, Jay and Annie met in college and used to have tons of sex all the time, but then once they had kids, they stopped having as much time and energy for it.  This doesn't actually come across as the World's Biggest Deal.  They seem to have a good relationship and probably just need some alone time.  Also, Annie's mom lives nearby and on two separate occasions in the film agrees to watch the kids on short notice, so you would think that getting said alone time also wouldn't be the World's Biggest Deal, but if it wasn't, there would be no movie, so...  Jay and Annie decide to spice up their marriage by making a sex tape of the two of them performing all of the positions from The Joy of Sex.  We don't get to actually see any of the sex tape until the end of the film (and what we do see is hilarious, for the record-- there are costumes, and Jason Segel singing for no real reason, and Cameron Diaz's stunt double (I would assume) doing flips off the couch), but apparently it lasts for three hours (which is implausible, but kudos to them, I guess), and they both seem to have a lot of fun making it.  The fun they have isn't actually from the recording of the sex, of course, but just from spending time together and trying new things, so they wouldn't have had to tape it to achieve the same result, but again, if they hadn't, no movie.

Jay promises to delete the movie after they're finished, but he doesn't, and it winds up getting uploaded to some sort of Cloud/Dropbox-like app that he has installed on the iPad they used to make the video.  We also learned earlier in the movie that Jay replaces his iPads pretty much any time a new model comes out and gives the older ones away as gifts, so Jay and Annie set out to find each individual iPad and delete the movies.  "Hey wait," you think to yourself even as you kind of enjoy the scenes where they go about getting the iPads back.  "This app he has installed is probably made up and I don't know exactly how it works, but if you delete the movie from the app itself, shouldn't it disappear on all of the iPads, unless people have already downloaded it to their hard drives?" The answer to this question is yes, but Jay and Annie don't find out you can do this until later.

Even so, it's clear that getting the iPads back should be simple, since they gave them all to people they know and see regularly in their daily lives, but the movie manages to stretch this out by having Jay and Annie do more stupid shit.  They find out Annie's boss's address and show up on his doorstep.  "Oh, hey," they do not say.  "You know that iPad we gave you?  Could we maybe see it for a minute to check something?"  This is literally all they would have to do.  Instead, they pretend to be there collecting money for charity, and Annie distracts her boss (Hank, played by Rob Lowe) while Jay searches for the iPad.  This leads to Annie and Hank (who seems super square but has weird tattoos and likes listening to rap and heavy metal and owns a lot of weird paintings with himself painted into scenes from Disney movies) snorting coke and Jay getting attacked by Hank's dog.  This is all kind of funny, but again, a lot of stupid, implausible stuff has to happen to make the scene possible.

And so the movie goes on in this manner.  Jay and Annie are blackmailed by a fifth-grader.  They take their kids with them to bust into the headquarters of the porn site that they learn the fifth-grader plans to upload the video to if they don't pay him $25,000. Jay, as previously mentioned, jumps off a balcony at one point.

Many of the individual scenes are pretty funny.  Like I mentioned, when we actually see the making of the sex tape, it's humorous.  The stuff with Annie's boss is funny in a bizarre sort of way.  Segel, Diaz, Lowe, Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper (who play friends that tag along for part of the iPad-retrieving journey), and Jack Black (who plays a porn site owner) all give good performances.  Unfortunately, all of the funny scenes and strong performances are taking place in a movie that doesn't make a lot of sense.