Friends with Benefits

The most revealing fact about Will Gluck’s Friends with Benefits sits in the grosses. A rival picture built on almost the same premise opened six months earlier, and the two finished within three hundred and fourteen thousand dollars of each other worldwide, both landing around a hundred and forty nine and a half million. Two studios raced the identical idea and audiences treated them as interchangeable. Even the title came out of that fight. Paramount objected to it and dropped the objection once the competing film was renamed No Strings Attached. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis worked the script with Gluck for more than a month before production, going through it in twenty page chunks. You can hear the result, because the dialogue runs long and overlapping instead of building toward punchlines, which is the main reason the leads sound like people talking rather than a draft being performed. The film names the conventions of romantic comedy out loud and then performs every one of them anyway. A good fit if watching a formula get labelled and then executed on purpose is the joke for you. Not a fit if a mass dance number in Grand Central is going to read as insincere rather than as the film keeping a promise it made in the first reel.