Devilish Jennifer a Lifeless Body
Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) is the most popular girl in school and she knows it. Able to get pretty much whatever she wants, she’s the epitome of High School evil, down to earth and rather drab best friend Anita ‘Needy’ Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) recognizing this fact even if she never does anything about it.
Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried in 20th Century Fox's Jennifer's Body
After a fiery night spent with the relatively unknown rock band Low Shoulder and their ominously macabre lead singer (Adam Brody), Jennifer returns home no longer the shimmering hair and perfect makeup figurehead of High School evil. Instead, she’s evil-evil, a demonic force taking up residence inside her body with an unquenchable hunger for teenage flesh. It ends up falling to Needy to stop her best friend before she eats her way through the entire school, her own adorably dweeby boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) the next awaiting potential morsel taking up space on Jennifer’s blood-splattered menu.
I don’t really have that much to say about director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s (Juno) malevolent horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body. While I liked some of the dialogue, and while there are a couple of rather inventively staged fright sequences overall I found this to be rather boring, and not to mention too self-reflexive and nonsensical for its own ultimate good.
There’s little else to say. This wannabe melding of Sam Raimi, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Supernatural” and 1970’s-style B-movie exploitation offers up little that consistently engages, and unlike recent genre fare (like Raimi’s own Drag Me to Hell) there’s little going on underneath the prom dress. The film sputters around, throws off a couple of great one liners, showcases a little visual inventiveness and then settles down into a benignly over-familiar routine. At one point, during what I presume was supposed to be a signature moment set in an empty construction site, I even yawned, my assumption being this was not the response the filmmakers were probably hoping for.
As for Fox’s acting there’s little to talk about. She’s perfectly acceptable as the she-devil from Hell, the only thing Kusama and Cody requiring her to do being to look pretty, flash some teeth and rip apart some flesh. To say she’s upstaged by her costar Seyfried pretty much goes without saying, but as she’s the one with the almost three-dimensional character to play she just as admittedly as far more to work with their her bra-busting counterpart.
Listen, fans of Cody’s work on Juno and on “The United States of Tara” will be largely satisfied with the majority of her dialogue. She’s got a great ear, and while the words coming out of her characters' mouths isn’t exactly natural it flows with such imaginative flair color me as being in the camp who find that sort of thing delightful. Like Joss Whedon (Serenity, “Dollhouse”) you know when you’ve entered Cody Country and I’m honestly excited to see what’s she’s got up her creative sleeve next.
But Jennifer’s Body isn’t anything to crow about. It goes nowhere, has only a handful of laughs and doesn’t produce a single solitary scare. The film is too on the nose and tends to monologue itself into a boring stupor far too frequently (especially towards the end). When your favorite part are the ingenious stills of a bloody massacre accompanying the end credits that’s never a good sign, the devil in the details here being that this cinematic exorcism just isn’t good enough to warrant all the fuss surrounding it.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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