No Strings Attached : Review

No Strings Attached plays out exactly as you would think. Kutcher and Portman play Adam and Emma, two people that have been bumping into one another for the past 15 years but until now have never done anything more than talk. Suddenly, after one night together turns into a second night together, Emma suggests they make an attempt at becoming friends with benefits. Being a male of prurient mind and body, Adam agrees. But, as life tells us, such arrangements don't often work and in order for this to be a movie it's not going to work this time either.

The humor here is pretty much your standard attempt at R-rated teenage raunch, humor that has pretty much lost my interest as it has become old hat at this point. It's now a matter of figuring out new ways to reference male and female genitalia and the variety of activities that can be done with them. Who would've ever thought face-value jokes, such as when Ludacris jokes about "busting a nut", would become the cliched norm?

I will admit there is one great scene where Portman pulls something of a Snooki moment and drunkenly asks a cabbie to take her to "Adam's house." When asked where that is she simply replies, "Where Adam lives." I laughed.

The film's greatest success is in screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether managing to tell a story everyone in the theater knows how it's going to turn out and doing it with a modicum of reality. Of course, certain situations arise that make it easier for our two protagonists to come together or move apart, but the fact there were moments where I thought the narrative may actually go somewhere other than the obvious is worthy of mention.

On the opposite side, the script rarely interjects anything all that new onto the landscape and the characters are a little bit thin. For example, Portman's character is never all that accessible as her motivations and reasons for her unwillingness to commit are never fully fleshed out. There's an attempt to explain things, but it's not enough to fully connect with the character or deliver an ending as powerful as I'm sure Reitman hoped.

There is room for some high praise for one of the film's performances, and it doesn't belong to Kutcher or Portman, though it's always fun when Portman let's loose a little bit. Instead, Greta Gerwig is the most likable face among the crowd and she's a star that's on the rise. After getting plenty of plaudits for her performance in Greenberg last year she'll next star opposite Russell Brand in the Arthur remake later this year and will also be seen, in what I assume will be a piece of perfecting casting, in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress. Gerwig is a performer that arrives like a breath of fresh air. There aren't many actresses like her working right now and if she chooses wisely she could be huge over the next couple of years.