The lame and surprisingly tame comedy “Sex Tape’’ loses stamina approximately halfway through the opening seven-minute montage of its stars, Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, as college students having nonstop (and non-explicit) sex.
Marriage and two kids later, they’re too pooped to get it on — Segel has some kind of vague job in the music industry and the ageless Diaz, a blogger, always looks like she’s fresh from the makeup department.
One night, while the kids are at her mom’s, they decide not only to do the nasty — but, with a little help from a bottle of tequila, re-enact every position from the ’70s DIY manual “The Joy of Sex’’ (don’t ask why) while recording their performance for posterity on an iPad.
This performance — mercifully fast-forwarded through at the end of the movie — looks pretty much like every other carefully staged Hollywood sex scene from the past 20 years.
Segel, who went full frontal for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,’’ sticks to displaying his newly toned butt. Diaz shows even less.
The paucity of skin and utter lack of sexual heat might be more forgivable if “Sex Tape’’ were actually funny.
But there’s a mechanical desperation in the script (Segel is one of three credited writers) that requires the couple to frantically try to recover several iPads containing the incriminating video (not tape).
Things aren’t helped by the sloppy direction of Jake Kasdan — who previously helmed the stars in “Bad Teacher,’’ which at least had the conviction of its bad taste.
Here the sex is shoved into a family/relationship comedy (Diaz mostly nags her spouse) to cringe-worthy effect, climaxing (so to speak) at a fourth-grade graduation ceremony.
There are a few laughs here and there.
Rob Lowe — who in real life was a celebrity sex tape pioneer back in the VHS era — spoofs himself as a seemingly straightlaced toy-company executive who is considering buying Diaz’s blog for a bundle.
When the couple turns up in the middle of the night to retrieve one of their iPads from him, Lowe is revealed as a coke-snorting party animal whose Southern California mansion (actually photographed, like the rest of the film, in Massachusetts for the tax subsidy) is filled with paintings of him posing with Disney characters (including Lowe’s infamous real-life Oscar co-star Snow White).
But Kasdan beats that gag to death, as he does Segel’s attempts to fight off Lowe’s ferocious German shepherd. And the couple’s pals’ (Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper) panting obsession with the sex tape.
Even for a farce, the situations stretch credulity far beyond the breaking point. This is the sort of movie where people who live in what looks like a $10 million house balk at paying a $25,000 bribe, and where they take the kids along while paying a nocturnal call to the servers of a sex-video Web site (where Jack Black puts in a brief, but very welcome, appearance).
It’s not really giving away anything important to report that our hapless couple ends up burning, shredding and burying their labor of lust — if only someone had done this with the digital master of “Sex Tape.’’ But then Sony wouldn’t have collected a hefty product-placement fee for what amounts to a 90-minute commercial for corporate rival Apple’s iPad.