 Behind all the façade, Jennifer's Body is actually the highly anticipated yet sad tale of its two stars.
Megan Fox started out as a minor television actress in 2001 with a recurring role as the hot girl next door, on the television sitcom Hope and Faith and hit the big time, six years later, when she literally got down and dirty in the Tranformers franchise and became the pin-up girl of choice of the 2000s. The same year saw the release of the sleeper hit Juno. Written by blogger, journalist, stripper and finally screenwriter Diablo Cody, Juno was a movie that put its heart on its sleeve - filled with meticulously sharpened one-liners and freestyle pop-culture references - and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Jennifer's Body, with Fox in the lead, a script written by Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama - who made a stunning debut with Girlfight - is a movie that means to be smart, sexy and scary but isn't.
Fox plays Jennifer, a decidedly not-nice high school hottie who practically leads her lifelong best friend, the sweet, brainy Needy (Amanda Seyfried), around on a leash. When Jennifer decides she wants to check out a indie rock band that's playing at the local roadhouse - Jennifer and Needy live in a tiny Midwestern town called Devil's Kettle - she intimidates Needy into coming along, even though that requires Needy to skip out on a date with her cute boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons.) Jennifer has her sights on the band's lead singer (played by Adam Brody, with eyeliner), but she's so sexually voracious that anyone in her immediate sphere is fair game. When Needy points out that one of their classmates, an Indian, is also at the club, Jennifer wonders aloud if he's been circumcised. "I always wanted to try sea cucumber,” she muses aloud, with a dead look in her eyes.
That's not the first of the many, many sexually forthright wisecracks in Jennifer's Body, each one announced boldly and declaratively, so we'll have plenty of time to register how plainspoken and sexually open these characters are. Just as Jennifer seems to be making some headway with the lead singer, a series of  events, including a fire that appears to have been started telekinetically (the movie raises the suggestion and never pursues it), instigates a personality change in her. Well, sort of. If Jennifer wasn't very nice before, suddenly, she's extremely hostile - as in luring unsuspecting male specimen into the woods and pulling their entrails out with her teeth. Meanwhile, Needy looks on, wide-eyed - it's the only expression she's got - as her best friend just gets meaner and meaner.
Jennifer's Body constantly juggles with ideas, but they're not attached to anything in the narrative in a way that makes sense. In one sequence, Kusama cuts between the sweet-but-boring sex Needy is having with her boyfriend and Jennifer's all-out blood-feast freakout. Is that just cool cutting? Or is it meant as an unfavorable comparison? There's no way to tell, and the actors don't tip us off either. Megan Fox's character is constructed and played so that her actions are inscrutable. The movie awkwardly frames her predicament as a kind of revenge against the male gender. But her viciousness - she preys mostly on nice, or at least OK, kids - is neither cathartic, nor does it make us recoil in horror. Her evil is shiny, hard and cheap. Take the advice: watch it, forget it, and move on.
– Ali Sultan
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME |
