Jennifer's Body proves Megan Fox and Adam Brody can act

If you are in high school and an insanely hot girl comes on to you out of nowhere, don’t get excited. She may want to eat your organs and drink your blood. Or at least, I think she wants to eat your organs and drink your blood. Do yourself a favor and start running anyway. It’s not entirely clear what Megan Fox is up to in Jennifer’s Body, a surprisingly offbeat horror/comedy/teen film by the writer of Juno, but it’s not good.

So here’s the deal. Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried, from Mean Girls and Mamma Mia) have supposedly been best friends for their whole lives. Then after an incident where a local bar spontaneously sets on fire, Jennifer is turned into a demon of sorts—I believe the correct word is succubus. She was already insanely hot, but now she needs to eat boys to keep up her good looks. Needy (yes, that’s really her name) is put into awkward situations as she learns more about her friend’s murderous appetite, leading to an eventual confrontation.

That’s the gist of it. There are a lot of predictable moments, and like most teen movies, everything ends at the prom, and it looks as tacky as any other prom you’ve ever seen. And oddly, we see very little of Jennifer’s body for a movie based on it. The strength of Jennifer’s Body is in some of the small bits and secondary characters.

Adam Brody (Seth from The OC) is surprisingly convincing as Nikolai Wolf, an indie rock lead singer of the band “Low Shoulder,” complete with eye liner and a suit. He has a small role, but performs outside of his OC-predicated confines. This is the first time I’ve seen him branch out, and I didn’t realize it was him for a while. Anyway, Nikolai and his band are not afraid to sell themselves to Satan to get a hit single, and they do just that. It’s hard for an indie band these days, especially one that looks exactly like The Killers. (I can’t be the only one who picked up on that.) If only they sounded as good as The Killers. I’d believe Brandon Flowers made a deal of his own if not for The Killers’ terrible second album, Sam’s Town. Though, the fact that they made a comeback is quite suspicious.

J.K. Simmons plays a high school teacher and is also great, as always, but Megan Fox steals the show. Whether or not this film does well at the box office (I’m leaning toward no), Fox has done herself a favor by proving she’s slightly more than just a pin-up girl in Michael Bay’s explosive Transformers movies. Aided by writer Diablo Cody’s knack for witty dialogue—as seen abundantly in Juno—Fox portrays Jennifer as a heartless yet funny, demonic yet human, man-eating woman. Turning into a succubus has made Jennifer content with killing, yet she does value her relationship with Needy—at least enough to not eat her. I didn’t think Fox had a talent for talking, but she’s quite convincing.

Though it has some inventive moments, beautiful wide shots, and humorous dialogue, I can’t recommend Jennifer’s Body. I also can’t condemn it. Like Jennifer’s victims, I am stuck. I really like much of what I see here, but I know this isn’t going to end well.

Score: 2.5 out of 5

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Original Review URL: http://www.cinemasoldier.com/articles/2009/9/18/jennifers-body-proves-megan-fox-and-adam-brody-can-act-revie.html