I’m sure anyone who would be visiting this site is familiar with the story of Diablo Cody: the stripper/phone sex operator who became a screenwriting wunderkind who won an Oscar her first time out the gate with “Juno”. She has a writing style full of witty catchphrases that can be mildly amusing at best and mildly irritating at worst. Her dialogue doesn’t at all reflect the way people talk, but it’s catchy nonetheless. She is to teenage girls what David Mamet is to tough guys and slippery salesman. Much like Mamet’s dialogue is referred to as “Mamet-speak,” I believe Cody’s words will become known as Cody-speak . . . assuming, of course, her screenwriting career lasts that long.
So, what does the Academy Award winning scribe of “Juno” do for an encore? She writes the sort of funny, sort of scary, but not enough of either horror flick “Jennifer’s Body”. The film stars the beautiful, tattooed, and over-exposed Megan Fox as Jennifer, the smart ass, cock tease cheerleader who every guy at the small town high school wants to nail. Every high school has a girl like Jennifer (God knows mine did), the smoldering, irresistible type who knew exactly the kind of power she had over men and how to use it; whether to get them to let her copy their English homework or to get them to buy drinks for her, whatever. She has that power.
One night she goes out to a local bar with her nerdy best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), to try and hit on the lead singer of a local band whom she describes as “salty” (salty is Cody-speak for beautiful). Well, Jennifer’s powers of seduction apparently work, because while the bar is burning down due to some freak accident, the lead singer of the band, who is hilariously named Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody), whisks her off to the safety of his van, while leaving Needy stranded. When Needy sees Jennifer again, she’s behaving very strangely, to put it mildly. And when local boys start turning up devoured, Needy starts to think that there is something very, very wrong with her friend.
Like “Juno”, this had enough quotable dialogue to fill a book. Unlike “Juno”, unfortunately, it didn’t give me any characters or story to give a damn about. By writing a horror film, Cody makes a game attempt to play in someone else’s sandbox, but there’s just not enough suspense or tension in the story to pull it off. Fox does a nice job of… um… filling Jennifer’s Body, and plays the uber-bitch and (literal) man-eater quite well (how much of that is actually acting, I’m not sure). Seyfried is good as the ugly-duckling best friend who reacts in horror to her friend’s… change, and Adam Brody is a hoot as the emo band’s lead singer/Satanist (watch and you’ll see). Johnny Simmons is okay as Needy’s geeky boyfriend Chip, but he kept reminding me of “Juno”‘s Michael Cera, except with only about a fraction of his dorky charm.
Director Karyn Kusama does a passable job, and creates a few nicely stylish moments, but is ultimately let down by Cody’s script. The zingers are there, the fake-but-weirdly authentic Cody-speak still has its unique jive, and there are PMS jokes aplenty, but the scares and story momentum are nonexistent, and for the most part, I was neither scared, nor amused, and really bored by the whole thing. Lonely, horny fanboys do get an eyeful of Megan Fox, that’s for sure, but they can get just as good a look at her rack by checking out their nearest magazine rack . . . and saving their eight bucks in the process.
