Chest Cavity
posted on Thursday, October 29, 2009 in Movie Reviews
Diablo Cody, the writer of Jennifer’s Body has been an easy target for both praise and disdain. To this day, it is being argued on the Internet whether the success of her previous writing effort, Juno, is because of her writing or in spite of it. It is with this mindset that many people went into theaters playing her latest film, hoping to find any support for either side. To be honest, the answer is starting to look like the latter. Jennifer’s Body is just a dumb horror film that replaces fear with quirk and hipster nonsense. Despite being total opposites, dorky teenager Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is best friends with cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox). One night Jennifer drags her along to a gig at a bar, where a freak accident causes a massive fire. The two manage to escape to safety, but are separated along the way. When the two reunite, Jennifer appears to have changed. She hungers for flesh, and starts murdering and eating some of the boys in school. Needy tries to figure all this out, looking for a way to take down Jennifer before she kills again.
Despite being in a completely different genre, Jennifer’s Body shares a lot of elements from Cody’s previous writing effort. The lead character is an outsider girl who’s inexplicably the best friend of a flighty, more outgoing girl. She’s in a relationship with an awkward boy caught up in a fringe school activity (track in Juno, band here). And of course, everybody talks in a language entirely composed of pop culture references and coined terms. It’s easy to dismiss Cody’s dialogue as gimmicky and overwritten, but one can’t deny how snappy and humorous it can be. But where the film diverges is in the building of the plot. Structurally, it doesn’t work, the first five minutes of the film already preempting the ending, taking away all suspense. Characters act in completely illogical ways, particularly the Needy, who can’t really seem to get around to saving people from her evil best friend. The plotting is just lazy and entirely clunky, the story lurching forward through silly inexplicable plot devices like visions and spiritual connections and all that. The dialogue remains snappy, but the gimmickry does get more annoying, as the characters stop in the middle of pressing action in order to deliver one of those lines. It makes these moments feel less important, quickly deflating the tension. Equally lazy filmmaking matches the emptiness of the plot. There are a couple of potentially clever metaphors littered across the screenplay, but the direction points so blatantly at them that the symbolism seems crass and exploitative.
I think we can officially say that Megan Fox tries too hard. Fox plays up her sexuality and little else, delivering all her lines with the same smoldering tone for the entire film. Amanda Seyfried doesn’t really seem to know how to handle the twisty pop culture laden sentences that Cody wrote for her character, and the lack of commitment kind of shows. In the supporting cast, Adam Brody steals the show by having way too much fun playing a skeevy emo band lead singer.
Jennifer’s Body will disappoint many of Cody’s defenders, the movie reinforcing what her critics have been saying all along. It’s like she learned all the wrong lessons from her success, forgetting that it was the copious amount of heart present in Juno that made it work so well, and not the rapid fire pop culture barrage in her dialogue. Some people loved that, and some hated it, but no one complained about the heart. Jennifer’s Body is missing its heart.
My Rating:
« previous Stray Thoughts
So There next »
PLDT Watchpad
