The screenwriter Daniel Waters has some funny films to his name, notably the influential 1989 Heathers — Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno, should send him royalty checks — but Sex and Death 101 is not one of them. His second venture doing double duty as writer and director (Happy Campers, 2001, was the first), Sex and Death is an unfortunate comedy about sex and love and all those things that can prevent a man from getting from one to the other, including (ostensibly) hot lesbian sex, (notionally) hot nonlesbian sex, (generically) hot girls licking spoons and hot (teenage) girls in school uniforms. And so it goes until this prince uncharming realizes he wants something, you know, more meaningful.
In other words, Sex and Death is a hard-boiled fantasy with a squishy center. The man in question is a single guy with the kind of name usually found next to a couple of X’s, Roderick Blank (Simon Baker), a looker whose bland existence derails when he receives a list naming all 101 women he will bed before he dies. The list puzzles him, as does the revelation of three guys in gray suits, Alpha (Robert Wisdom), Beta (Tanc Sade) and Fred (Patton Oswalt), who hang out in a white room weighing the fate of mortals and have some connection with the roll call. As these three rehearse the all-seeing, all-knowing routine, Roderick takes the opportunity to dump his castrating fiancee and liberate his inner player.
The appealing Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation. As Roderick makes his way down his list, he veers unpersuasively from glib to crude, mawkish and desperate, with a little limp screwball and frantic mugging tossed in. The film generally remains unfunny, but in different registers. What Waters appears to have been after is the kind of crude romp that brings to mind the hustling likes of Dudley Moore, whose moves could have been synched to The Benny Hill Show and probably were.
Oh, yes, Winona Ryder, who memorably starred in Heathers, shows up periodically as Death Nell, a mysterious vamp with a Black Widow complex and some nasty black heels. I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing in this film, and I don’t believe that Waters or Ryder know either.
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