Diablo Cody's screenplay elevates Jennifer's Body above your run-of-the-mill multiplex horror flick, but not by as much as it should. For every witty line there are two others that fall flat (and her satire of indie-bands is weaker than my hipster satire, and I improvise mine on the spot!). Megan Fox proves herself capable of doing more than just getting her leg humped by tiny Transformer robots: she can deliver a fast-paced Cody-zinger well enough and in fact deals with the lines better than Amanda Seyfried, who is no doubt a better actress but gets stuck with a grating voice-over.
The film isn't scary and doesn't try very hard to be, nor does it dig very far beneath the surface to find anything particularly new or interesting to say about teenage female sexuality ("Hell is a teenage girl"--the tagline reads, which is about as deep as it gets, though one can't help but imagine the kind of body-horror film someone like Cronenberg could dig out of the material). So we're left with a few witty lines and Megan Fox making out with Amanda Seyfried, but there are far worse ways to spend an afternoon than that.
Yeah, this is about right. The voice-over stuff is even worse than Harrison Ford's voice-over stuff in the theatrical cut of BLADE RUNNER. But essentially: JENNIFER'S BODY could have been scarier and/or could have been funnier -- but it's not enough of either, so it kind of disappoints. But I think it's worth seeing.
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