BODY SHOTS (New Line) Starring: Sean Patrick Flanery, Jerry O'Connell, Amanda Peet, Tara Reid, Brad Rowe, Ron Livingston, Emily Procter, Sybil Temchen. Screenplay: David McKenna. Producers: Harry Colomby and Jennifer Keohane. Director: Michael Cristofer. MPAA Rating: R (sexual situations, profanity, nudity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 98 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
BODY SHOTS opens with a profound quote attributed to "anonymous": "I'll give you a ride/On my jelly roll/But I won't give you nothin'/From my soul." That's about as succinct a summation as any for this lugubrious, pretentious exercise in Gen Y navel-gazing that follows eight single young Los Angelenos through a club-hopping Friday night and a what-the-hell-happened Saturday morning. Four guy pals -- Rick (Sean Patrick Flanery), Mike (Jerry O'Connell), Shawn (Brad Rowe) and Trent (Ron Livingston) -- meet up with four gal pals -- Jane (Amanda Peet), Sara (Tara Reid), Whitney (Emily Procter) and Emma (Sybil Temchen) -- at a hot nightspot, and begin pairing off in various combinations. Accompanying their dalliances are running talk-to-the-screen commentaries by the characters on contemporary love and sex that make the "Confessional" segments on "The Real World" look like revelations of zen wisdom.
Those pseudo-profound asides -- spending long stretches on subjects like oral sex technique under the winking guise of "telling it like it is" -- are plenty bad enough to make BODY SHOTS an irritating experience. It becomes positively headache-inducing when director Michael Cristofer starts dragging out each and every scene for all the slow-motion, lingering pause significance it's worth. Characters spin in blissful kisses on the dance floor for minutes at a time, serenaded by the droning observations of their friends; interminable silences are punctuated by someone else's equally interminable silence. It's one thing to make a movie about life's painfully uncomfortable moments. It's another to make that movie panifully uncomfortable for the people watching it.
Things go from very bad to even worse in the final half hour, which is dedicated almost exclusively to a he-said/she-said date rape scenario involving testosterone-beast professional football player Mike (who apparently didn't get the memo that the Raiders had moved back to Oakland) and the flirtatious Sara. The jerky flashbacks show wildly different versions of the same event, as Cristofer strains to give the tale RASHOMON-like credibility. Then, strangely, the incident becomes less about exploring lack of communication between sexual partners than about lecturing on the treacherous combination of alcohol and raging libidos; you half-expect someone to step out of character and tell you where you can find literature on helping friends avoid binge beer-goggling. Both Mike and Sara get to stare at the floor pensively as they try to figure out exactly what they really remember, every passing second of the violent rape Sara recounts feeling more exploitative because there's no reason for us to care about the people involved.
The reason there's no particular reason for us to care is that these characters aren't really people. The ad campaign for BODY SHOTS touts it as one of those "movies that define every decade," but screenwriter David McKenna makes his decade-defining generalizations by making his characters single-trait generic -- Shawn is sensitive, Emma is sensitive in a slightly different way, Whitney has a vaguely Southern accent. Only Ron Livingston, as the crew's resident eccentric, gets enough unique personality to make a comic impression (which he does admirably in the film's few worthwhile scenes). The monotonous talking-head asides provide the only insight BODY SHOTS has to offer into its characters, and then McKenna uses the time to blow the lid off the fact that -- gasp -- there's a sexual double-standard between men and women. With its marathon sex scenes and graphically trite narration, BODY SHOTS generally feels like porn with delusions of social commentary. Ultimately, it's just there to give you a ride on its jelly roll, but it won't give you nothin' from its soul.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 night clubbings: 2.
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