No Strings Attached (Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Kevin Kline) – Memo to Natalie Portman: Nat, you are better than this; way better. While she is the favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her unbelievable performance in Black Swan, some studio executive decided to release this awful chick flick that Portman executive produced while Oscar-nominated director (for Up in the Air) Ivan Reitman both produced and directed. I assume that Natalie and her handlers thought that she needed to lighten her image in a RomCom. That was either a really bad idea or a total miscalculation. The timing couldn’t have been worse although I can understand the reasoning. It’s not that she isn’t cute enough to play these parts but it is just clearly beneath her talents.
And while Iowa’s own Ashton Kutcher is likable enough, all he plays are chick flicks. In movie parlance, he has no gravitas. Together, they are at least charming. He plays the nice guy working as a production assistant on a Hollywood TV “Glee”-like show. She plays a medical intern who lives with three other would-be physicians. He is the son of a once-famous TV star played by the multi-talented (and Oscar-winner Kevin Kline) with whom he has a distant relationship. She plays a cold fish who isn’t the affectionate type for reasons that we find out late in the movie but for which we don’t care. He wants a real relationship; she wants a sex buddy. So they hook up, have sex everywhere and at all hours, and use enough gross words to fill a Judd Apatow reefer comedy. I suppose this is done in a blatant attempt to attract a younger audience than your typical romantic comedy.
The film fails in so many ways. It tries to be sexy (almost succeeding), funny (rarely), and poignant (no way) while exploring family relationships (stereotyping everywhere) and deep-seeded psychological motivations (psychobabble). I just can’t believe she was so involved in this film, that Reitman thought there was a good movie in this awful script, that Kline agreed to stoop to this level, and that the studio would dare to release this during the Oscar voting period. See it at your peril.