Jennifer’s Body

[September 16th, 2009]

The buzz on Jennifer’s Body is that it is tatted Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s subversion of slasher-flick women’s victimization, a middle finger in the eye to the boys who slobber over butchered female flesh. This holds up to scrutiny about as well as the idea that a scene featuring a kiss between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, their tongues exploring each other’s slick mouths like tiny coal miners, is a candid exploration of lesbian sexuality. The men in the preview audience did not seem threatened. Jennifer’s Body is Heathers as a Maxim photo spread. Cody’s nihilism-flavored bubblegum dialogue suggests that the movie is intended as a satire—what it’s supposed to be satirizing is unclear, unless it’s any genuine human experience. Look here! A teacher with a hook for a hand! Titter! Over there! Parents hoarsely weeping over the mutilated body of their child! Giggle! “We had faith,” Seyfried narrates in the aftermath of a juke-joint fire that kills eight high-school students. “We were fucking idiots.” At least they didn’t pay $10.50 for a ticket.

Early notices for Jennifer’s Body have suggested that lip-glossed Transformers vamp Megan Fox has the acting chops of a porn star. This is imprecise. Porn stars take their clothes off. Fox’s striptease titillation is for kids who can sneak into an R-rated motion picture but do not understand how to work the Internet. She dispatches her victims—a varsity lunk, a Cub-Scout Billie Joe Armstrong—by tearing into their chest cavities, which means, considering the movie’s putative gyno-vengeance premise, her character either has extremely poor depth perception or a woeful knowledge of male anatomy. In this and nearly every other respect, director Karyn Kusama’s work is a diluted imitation of Teeth, the vagina-dentata horror: That movie bungled its central idea, but at least it had an idea to bungle. Jennifer’s Body begs for outraged reviews condemning it as repellent and vindictive, when in fact it is derivative and incompetent. If it were not written by Diablo Cody, it would be completely ignored. In fact, it can still be ignored. R.