Film Review: Jennifer’s Body
Capitalizing on a High School Scare Flick
By Rianne Hill Soriano
“Jennifer’s Body” works more as a teen sex ad that seeks pleasure on seeing Megan Fox looking high school foxy as a scarily hot horror queen in the usual scare flick set-up. And it could probably work best for midnight screenings and slumber parties. Overall, it’s not as frightening as it should be; it’s not as hip and funny as it would like to be; yet, it’s not a complete disaster if merely accepted as a lowbrow gore and titillation offer to hormone-raging audiences and undemanding slasher film lovers.
As a brisk, bloody mix of gory horror and high school comedy punctuated by the typical scare elements and high school cheekiness, the film hobbles with tonal inconsistencies because of merely concentrating on having two-dimensional characters. It fails to capitalize on its campy premise about the usual girl-in-distress who would latter go to the opposite side of the fence – which could have effectively worked side-by-side the commercial appeal of Fox who plays the lead character of the film. Actually, there are moments of inspired cleverness and decent scares, but they are not frequent or sustained enough.
The film seems to want a lot but it doesn’t manage to achieve them accordingly. Screenwriter Diablo Cody (Oscar winner for her “Juno” screenplay) has a few good points to make about the frenemy dynamics in a high school setting including teenage relationships and connections, party fun, fame and power plays, sexual excitement, among other things. Director Karyn Kusama tries to mount a certain atmosphere in what it’s like to be adolescent girls who come into sexual and social power through tragedies. However, the final output still looks amateurish that the film actually renders itself as a lackluster scare flick. The good intentions doesn’t get to deliver well, perhaps because of some mainstream requirements to do this and that to maintain its formulaic cash cow bearing. Kusama seems torn between the duty to female empowerment and the movie’s slasher conventions that the main character is not really defined that effectively. Even Fox’s performance makes it hard to measure up to the ideal character development that the audience should see on her. And while it wants to put that higher level of tone and treatment in itself, it gets too lost in trying to be hip, current, alternative, and mainstream all at the same time.
“Jennifer’s Body” actually takes a common theme on slasher films – the panicky fascination with female sexuality which grows to become a weapon of evil. However, the movie doesn’t live up to its full potential because of many things, part of which is its clunky pace, some distracting elements in the screenplay, and the film’s reliance on Fox’s fame to sell tickets. The idea of Fox playing an evil high school beauty queen who eats the boys she seduces definitely sounds sellout interesting primarily in the box office. Yet, the film is neither cringe-inducingly frightening nor laugh-out-loud funny. It is punctuated by gory episodes and high school fun moments, but much of them are not explored well enough – lacking in suspense and surprise to raise the potential of bringing some real cinematic power to itself.
Though Fox as Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried as Needy considerably work well as high school frenemies in the story, especially in terms of chemistry, their thinly conceived and underdeveloped characterizations, along with the heavy-handed direction of the film, leave little to make their characters fully desirable in terms of cinematic brilliance.
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