Friends with Benefits – Review

Face it: We can glorify it, we can deny it, we can nonchalantly do it, but sex is awesome and yet sex is messy. And by messy, I don’t mean, the sweat and “stuff,” I mean the attachments to the act, the deed. Sex means something. No matter how you slice and dice it. You can pretend that it’s just “something to do” yet, if you can just leave babies and STDs out of this argument for a minute, it’s still something you share with someone, and sharing is a connection, which is a very basic level of human need, which leads to desire. And we need, that’s why there’s a slew of rom-com’s each year that our sisters, girlfriends, and wives flock to the theater to go see. We love connections, no matter how real or how cliche, and Friends with Benefits is a funny jab at the cliche.

Of course, Friends with Benefits walks this fine line of recognizing the cliches, yet it falls into it, because cliches stem from something that happens frequently. So for anyone that walks out of the film, saying “it was like every other rom-com,” well, duh damn it. That’s love, that’s sex, that’s life. Justin Timberlake and the gorgeous, fine, hot, Mila Kunis, have incredible chemistry together, easily sweeping us up on this twisty love tale. They’re sweet, funny, and at times which I won’t spoil, tragic. You can relate to their situation, through and through, to the ideas of dating, sex, and family issues, but it’s what gets you through it.

The film hits all those rom-com notes: they meet, they like each other, which turns into love, but the big third act issue almost splits them. A 1,000 movies have done this before, and a 1,000 more will continue it, but Friends with Benefits is unusually side-splitting funny, while being smart enough to handle the cliches with a little self-referential-ism. It’s also very hip to pop culture with some funny references.

Because life moves as a super clip, with apps that can barely keep up, how do relationships stand a chance? As Friends with Benefits so hilariously and touchingly shows,  maybe sometimes we just keep screwing until that one One Night Stand changes your life – and you call them back.

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