No strings…

No Strings Attached (Score from the motion picture)

Ivan Reitman brings out yet another romcom in ‘No strings attached’. Ashton Kutcher plays the male lead and once you see the poster of a movie featuring him it leaves no doubt as to what genre the movie will fall under. The female lead is played by Natalie Portman who has received some killer reviews for her recent performance in Black Swan. Reitman is quite an expert in romantic comedies and has directed some good movies like “Six days seven nights”, “Kindergarten cop”, “Junior” etc. But some of his movies can be a little over the top. With No strings he has completely blown the top.

The movie starts with teenage Kutcher and Portman having a conversation outside of a school party. Then it is shown that they meet a few times thanks to coincidences that happen too often in movies. Ashton Kutcher has this typical man whore of a father(Kevin Kline) who is a TV celebrity. His moment of heartbreak happens when he learns his father is living in with his ex girlfriend. The scenes portraying all these instances are meant to be funny but go nowhere near amusing the audience. You are struggling to smile at the complete idiocy of the events that converge. On friends’ advice Kutcher gets drunk and calls all the girls he knows for a night of sex. He ends up in Portman’s house completely hammered and learns about his little tribal-sex-dance the next day from her. Both see the funny side of things and then get down to the activity which this movie claims to have a lot right from the outset, sex. Portman firmly believes that she is no good with relationships and finds a convenient sex partner in Kutcher. They hook up whenever they wanna do it. Kutcher who has always harbored a crush on her, is what I gathered from that timeline representation at the start of the movie else it was useless, finds himself falling for her. Later come the sad background music, a lot of crying, almost having sex with a bimbo and ultimately the realization. You know the drill. From start to end the movie is so horribly predictable that you can wake up anywhere during the movie and follow it completely.

Ashton Kutcher looks good and as unintentionally stupid as ever. Natalie Portman looks bad and drives home a message that size zero isn’t for everybody. Does she do a good job? Well, yeah. How can you do a bad job here? There isn’t even much of a job to do. The movie is old fruit juice is in a not very bright new packing. The reason it is fruit juice and not wine is because the concept has become so familiar now that it isn’t wine anymore and tastes more like very stale fruit juice. The packing has nothing refreshing, same settings, daddy issues, supportive friends and family feuds. The sad part of this movie is even when it fails people will go back to watch another movie like this because it doesn’t even set an example that a movie so banal should never be made if you have nothing new or exciting to talk about. Wait, there was something new. One of the friends of the male lead is a kid of two gay dads. Not funny, dude.

Elizabeth Merriweather and Michael Samonek have written the story and Merriweather has also done the screenplay. I wonder why it took two people to right this listless script. There is an argument here. You walk into this movie knowing you are going to go through some scenes that will feature puppy love and some comedy that will be racist. You also realize from experience that the puppy love may get exaggerated to a point of nausea. This is bearable only if the movie has some good scenes that make up for these scenes. I am not against puppy love. There are 100 ways of saying it and some are beautiful indeed. The movie is hotch potch that moves at a singular pace with very little excitement, Kutcher stuttering his dialogues and Portman sporting an exhausted look from all the dieting she has done to get that look in this movie. You think, you still wanna go watch it then go back and read this post right from the start. This movie has no strings whatsoever!
No Strings Attached (Music From The Motion Picture)