Let the official “Na na na na, hey hey hey, good bye” begin for Diablo Cody.
Image Courtesy of IMPawards.com
Director: Karyn Kusama
Notable Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Megan Fox, J.K Simmons
With Jason Reitman’s Up in the air getting rave reviews on the festival circuit, and Ellen Page earning commercial and critical bonafides in the past year, the last member of the trio that made Juno work to much acclaim is behind another film with Jennifer’s Body. And if this is any indication of Diablo Cody’s future career potential, then perhaps she’ll be back stripping and operating a phone sex line faster before she knows it.
Jennifer (Megan Fox) is the ultimate “it” girl in what appears to be a small town in Wisconsin. Envied by all the girls, and dreamed about by all the boys, she’s the sort that has nothing between her ears but still manages to be the best of her little world. Her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is everything she isn’t, being perhaps the geekiest girl in school, but they’ve been friends since they were old enough to be in a sandbox. When Jennifer drags Needy to a rock concert of a band she likes, and a fire kills nearly everyone inside it, it leads to a change that will change Jennifer and the nature of their friendship forever. And it turns into one of the most spectacular failures of the decade as Cody shows that perhaps she was the weakest link of the group despite being its only Oscar winner.
Jennifer’s Body contains all of the same elements of Juno, from its strong female characters to pretentious hipster dialogue, but does it to such an alarmingly bad degree that it’s almost baffling. It’s as if Cody took what worked from Juno and opted to turn it up ad nausea but without the sort of oversight that went into her first film. All of the things one could criticize Juno for are in overabundance here. It’s as if Cody felt that she could turn in a “light” version of her first script, in a different genre, and everything would be ok. Throw in narration from Needy and a plot that is told in flashbacks and you have all the trappings of a film seeking an identity; it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a camp classic or a serious horror flick. It wades in that middle ground and doesn’t do either well enough to make up for it. And with an inferior script one could imagine that a top notch cast could save it. Too bad Karyn Kusama has Megan Fox in the title role.
Not asked to do much in either Transformers film nor in the Simon Pegg vehicle How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Fox’s acting talents are needed to save the film from itself. She’s not Ellen Page by any stretch of the means and Kusama does her a disservice by exposing her lack of any sort of talents outside of physical ones. This isn’t a Transformers film and Michael Bay isn’t there to disguise it in a see of explosions and quick cuts. Left to carry a film with more then just skimpy clothing Fox is less an actress and more of a rank amateur. Especially when she’s on the screen with Amanda Seyfried.
Seyfried, an up and coming actress who showed off surprising vocals in last year’s Mamma Mia!, is an absolute delight on the screen. Able to disguise herself in the trappings of teenage geekdom, Seyfried brings the sort of professional performance the rest of the film needs. With J.K Simmons making an appearance that amounts to nothing more than an extended cameo, if only to remind us that he was in Juno, the film seems to work when it allows Seyfried the ability to carry it. The problem is that those moments are few and far between; any time she’s paired with Fox it’s a train wreck of epic proportions.
And that’s ultimately what the film can best be described as. With an Oscar on her mantle already, Cody has accomplished more then most screenwriters ever will. And with a stinker like Jennifer’s Body on her cinematic resume, she’s accomplished what hundreds of other screenwriters have done as well: write a bad, bad movie.
