Body Shots (New Line Cinema) is a mess. Throw together eight twentysomething actors with modest talent, write a script that goes and hope that the good looks of the lead actors will draw in teens – that’s Body Shots.
The film is divided into three different sections – foreplay, good sex, bad sex and afterplay. Foreplay is entirely useless. The segment consists of each character speaking into the camera and giving brief monologues about their opinions on sex. From these 30 seconds, movie-goers are supposed to ascertain the personalities of the characters. However, the viewer ends up with nothing more than one-word adjective descriptions.
Mike (Jerry O’Connell, Jerry Maguire) is the bad guy who goes after women with a predatory desire. Sean (Brad Rowe) also is a purely stereotypical character. He’s the angel who will never touch a woman. Sex without love equals violence, Sean says in the film.
Rick (Sean Patrick Flanery, Suicide Kings) falls somewhere in the middle of Mike and Rick. He wants to be monogamous and is willing to be intimate with the woman he loves. Trent (Ron Livingston, Office Space) is the happy-go-lucky type, willing to do whatever he can to get with a woman but in an unthreatening, innocent way. He provides the little comic relief in the film.
The female characters in the film are more superficial than the men. They are bare sketches of people. The film is definitely from a male viewpoint, considering the minimal screen time allotted to the women. Whitney (Emily Procter, Guenivere) and Emma (Sybil Temchen) do little in the movie. Jane, (Amanda Peet, Jack and Jill) is Rick’s quasi-girlfriend. Sara (Tara Reid, American Pie) adds the dumb-girl-who-may-get-herself-into-trouble-with-the-wrong-guy facet. They get most of the female dialogue in the movie.
The middle section of the movie deals with the main characters describing the previous night. However, they have difficulties because everyone in the film was extremely drunk at the time.
The only source of dramatic conflict in Body Shots comes from another formulaic idea – the question of whether Mike raped Sara. She runs to Jane’s house, Mike gets arrested and the audience sees flashbacks from both their perspectives. No surprises there. Sadly, the script is not good enough to make the viewer care about the truth. It is almost insulting that a subject as serious as rape is in a movie this trivial.
The problems don’t end there. The movie does not present its message clearly, if there is even a message. Is it glorifying rape, or denouncing it? Is it saying that casual sex is okay, as long as both parties are consensual? Body Shots presents a bunch of questions but fails to answer any of them.
The one thing the film does display clearly is that the gender gap may be wider now than at any point in American history – at least in terms of sex. The women and men in Body Shots have completely different definitions of rape. Once the rape occurs the group splits right down the gender line. No one is able to remain impartial, and the stress of choosing one’s allegiance destroys Rick and Jane’s burgeoning relationship.
Finally, this is one of those movies that seems to go out of its way to annoy parents. Every character drinks, and many of the characters speak with such frankness about sex that it becomes quite hard to stomach. In the end Body Shots leaves the movie-goer with little – except maybe a stomachache.
Body Shots is in theaters.
