No Strings Attached Review (2011)

Ivan Reitman hasn't directed a film since 2006 with My Super Ex-Girlfriend and honestly I can understand why as that film was down right awful. This time around he teams up with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman to make a film about friends who decide to have an 'only-sex' based relationship.

I was quite surprised to see Natalie Portman make this type of film. You'd normally see her in indie films like Garden State or in Oscar winning performances like Black Swan, not your typical Rom-com. But I'm a great fan of Portman's work and was interested to see how she'd fair in and a film that wouldn't necessarily push her acting abilities. Ashton Kutcher on the other hand is made for movies like this. He's made so many of these kind of movies he should be able to do them in his sleep. Not saying he's a bad actor just that maybe he could try something a bit different from time to time.

This film can be quite funny at times but goes into bad taste territory far too much. In a way you can understand it after the success of films like Knocked Up and more recently Bridesmaids but those films have a reason for it and the audience expects toilet humour from them (which both films do very well) I for one love those type of films. But that's not what I was expecting from this film. I wasn't expecting to hear the lines like 'can I finger you' in a Rom-com. I guess that's maybe the way it is these days when it comes to films aimed at young adults, they have to put in some toilet humour to appeal to the kids...Honestly I don't know but it feels totally unnecessary and takes you away from the story in this film. We all know deep down it's a typical light hearted Rom-com and doesn't need to impress it's audience by adding in some extra swearwords.

Ashton and Natalie do show some chemistry but again not quite as much as say Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway in Love and other drugs. Maybe because Natalie is out of her comfort zone. Maybe Ashton just isn't a very good actor. Both those arguments are open to debate, I just didn't see that kind of chemistry here. By no means was the idea for this movie a bad one, it just doesn't seem to know what type of film it wants to be.