Friends With Benefits

Nora Ephron's When Harry Met Sally... asked, 'Can men and women just be friends?' Or would the temptation to sex always get in the way and ruin things? Over twenty years on, and the question has become 'Can men and women just have sex?' New friends Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) decide sex will be something they do together, like any other shared hobby, and that they will avoid the rom-com cliches that say they can't do this.

If you're going to playfully criticise your own genre, you better be damned sure you're offering something better, which Friends With Benefits unfortunately isn't, for all that it has its characters bad-mouth the cliches of lazy rom-coms. This isn't a lazy rom-com, but does stray a little too far in the opposite direction, wandering into the territory of try-hard rom-com, and fulfilling a bunch of cliches while it's at it.

Luckily, director Will Gluck (Easy A), who is also one of the film's three scriptwriters, has an ace up his sleeve in the form of his leads, the charming and likeable Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. The combined forcefield of their charisma does a pretty damn good job of selling their relationship, fielding such wacky curveballs as a romantic flashmob with as much grace as can reasonably be expected. Oh yes, there's a flashmob. Apparently Gluck is one of only two people in the whole world (the other works at T-Mobile) who believe that scenes involving flashmobs are useful as anything other than a handy emetic should you accidentally ingest floor polish.