Much like the hapless victims of the title character, Jennifer's Body gets devoured by it's own expectations and mindless marketing campaign. This is writer Diablo Cody's highly anticipated follow-up to her breakout hit, Juno, which catapulted both her and star Ellen Page to super stardom. Since then, Page has struggled to gain a foothold in anything worth mentioning. Cody used it as a launching pad to her own Showtime series, which is pretty good actually. Without question, this film was made for it's star, Megan Fox. It exists so that horny old men like me and teenage wankers can ogle at her goods while she prances around bouncily in the skimpiest of outfits. I have no problem with that(see also: Sorority Row), but once that fades I start looking for a story to keep me interested, and for the life of me I couldn't find one.
Amanda Seyfried(Mean Girls, Big Love) plays Needy, the Sarah plain and tall of this adolescent fetish flick. She's Jennifer's BFF, since they were both playing in sandboxes. Hopefully Needy isn't her given name, but it surely fits her personality. She's constantly living in Jennifer's shadow, and dying for her approval. Jennifer is the top dog, every chick wants to be her and all the guys want to be with her. One night, the two girls attend a rock concert at a dive bar, headlined by some unknown band(led by Adam Brody) called Low Shoulder. The bar burns to the ground White Snake-style, and Jennifer decides to go off alone with the band in their creepy molester van. The band turn out to be not so nice(go figure!), and attempt to murder Jennifer in a satanic ritual to grant them instant celebrity. It works...all except that Jennifer ain't quite dead. Instead she's developed demonic powers and an insatiable thirst for man sauce. By man sauce I mean the blood of dudes. Get your head out of the gutter.
Jennifer uses her obvious charms to sucker in those poor dudes who never would've had a shot at her before. Both the popular and the losers fall victim to her bloody rage, but nobody seems to suspect the worst. Only Needy knows what's going on, mainly because Jennifer is confident enough in their pact of sisterhood to reveal the gory details. But when Jennifer's rampage starts to hit a little too close to home, it's up to Needy to possibly throw their friendship aside and either save her friend or destroy her.
I don't want to be one of those people who jumps on the Diablo Cody hating bandwagon, but the most distracting aspect of this film has nothing to do with the way Megan Fox looks bouncing on the bed in her underwear. Ok, that was pretty distracting too, but the script is absolutely horrendous. After Juno, I had a sense of Cody's writing style, which would be like a cross between Joss Whedon and a promo writer for the WWE. I could almost see Cody's notes all around the drafts of the script saying "Isn't this so hip? Look, I added a "y" to that word to make it sound fresh!" There's an overabundance of this hipster geek dialogue running throughout Juno as well, but at least that film felt personal and had an emotional core to it to sustain it, not to mention the elite acting chops of Ellen Page. It's by no means one of my favorite films, but I can see why someone would love Juno.
What we have here is Megan Fox doing her best impression of an evil kupie doll. She's so overdone and heavily made up that I thought I was watching the unreleased sequel to Memoirs of a Geisha. She pouts her lips, presumably because we guys love that crap, as a response to everything. If she's angry? Pouts her lips. If she's happy? Pouts her lips. I'd like to see someone pout their lips at her for once, her head would probably go all explodey. Fox has been attached to this film from the very beginning. Might as well say it was written for her, and it plays into her public persona perfectly. To me, it's always been a role that seems ill suited for her. She's undeniably hot, like the title character of this film is supposed to be, but there's a distinct lack of sensuousness and sexiness when she's acting, especially when she's trying to be sexy. There's a scene here where Fox is decked out in a cheerleader outfit, which usually I would salivate over on most women, and I spent most of my time noticing just how stiff she was by comparison to everyone else. As attractive as she is, she doesn't wear the role of "hot chick" all that well.
If you're going to make a dark horror/comedy like this, you have to expect the typical tropes to be in play. There are absolutely no surprises to be found here. It's all pretty standard and by the numbers. People you don't care about are killed, and eventually someone is targeted that you're supposed to have an emotional stake in. The seemingly weak hero of the story suddenly gets an injection of never before seen courage, and yadda yadda yadda. Even Sorority Row was less predictable than this. It was like somebody handed out copies of "Horror by Numbers".
Complaining aside, I do realize that this is just a vanity project that should be taken about as seriously as an episode of Three Stooges. It's meant to be fun, and Cody clearly is having a good time with the material.It allows her to indulge in all of her and our fantasies. Women get their revenge on us evil men. Us evil men get some hot lesbian action to mull over during those quiet, personal moments. For that, Cody gets my thanks. It's her voice that dominates this film. The director's hand is barely at play, except for a few none too subtle camera pans of Fox's nether-regions. I hate to say it, but this would've been a better film without Cody's influence. Guess I'm turning into a hater after all.
5/10
