Friends with Benefits – movie review

Romantic comedies are a guilty pleasure of mine. Granted, as a female, I feel like it’s expected that I love the genre, but I still don’t like to admit it. I dredge through every cliched film Hollywood throws at me, secretly enjoying the camp and the predictability of it all. Friends with Benefits maintains the predictability of romantic comedies while simultaneously surprising me by mocking its own genre. It is, in every sense of the word, amazing.

I will admit that going in I wanted to know set Friends with Benefits apart from the semi-recent No Strings Attached, since the two share the plot of friends having casual sex. No Strings Attached makes no bones about the fact that it is nothing more than a romantic comedy, whereas Friends with Benefits mocks romantic comedy at its very core. It has a movie within a movie, I Love You, I Love New York with Jason Segel which demonstrates all the cliches, right down to California doubling for New York. Justin Timberlake’s character Dylan pokes at all the cliches, whereas Mila’s character Jamie loves the movie, knows it line for line, and takes a rule about dating from it.

Dylan and Jamie are a great example of opposites attract, and they were an awesome set of best friends. Dylan is from Los Angeles, likes the laid-back lifestyle, and does not like to express emotions. Jamie loves New York with its hustle and bustle and spontaneity, and can be too emotional. However, the two work together. They introduce each other to worlds they didn’t know, and through the power of their friendship, as cliché as this sounds, help fix the other’s deep-rooted emotional issues.

Justin Timberlake’s performance as Dylan made me realize that, while he was my least favorite member of NSYNC, I enjoy him as an actor. Dylan is the definition of “adorkable.” He’s not a bad looking guy, and on the surface seems like this perfect guy with the one emotional flaw.  It turns out he’s super bad at math (“I’m six feet tall, and that wall is like three times my size, so it’s…ninety-two feet tall”) and has a horrible stutter when he’s scared. He has a lightening bolt tattoo he thought would give him superpowers and likes Harry Potter. He loves his sister Annie, his nephew Sam, and his father very much, too, even though he never talks about them to his best friend Jamie. It’s all part of his inability to express his emotions.

I don’t think I could not love Mila Kunis in a movie, and this was no exception. Jamie had no problem admitting that she was emotionally damaged. Even though we learn that her unconventional mother is always hooking up with a new man and Jamie fears that will be her future, that’s all we learn about Jamie’s emotional damage. I honestly don’t believe that one person could ruin another so completely, and it’s a bit ironic that we learn all about the life of the emotionally walled Dylan and so little about Jamie. Jamie also thinks that love is like a fairy tale, which is cute. She also has a tattoo of a dog because in a bout of teen rebellion, she wanted to get the most conventional tattoo she could think of.

I love one of the shout outs Friends with Benefits gives to Easy A, which shares cast members Emma Stone and Patricia Clarkson, as well as director Will Gluck. When Jamie is about to meet Dylan at the airport, she steals a sign that reads “O. Penderghast.” It’s a small thing barely worth commenting on, but it made me giggle.

Friends with Benefits is a smart romantic comedy that I don’t feel the need to hide from my friends that I enjoy – I would proudly tell them that I love this movie. There is no comparison to No Strings Attached as FWB is way better, and I liked NSA. I would definitely recommend Friends with Benefits to lovers of the romantic comedy, especially if it is a guilty pleasure.