Casual Sex?

Directed by Geneviève Robert, Casual Sex? details the complications and wackiness that ensues after friends Stacy (Lea Thompson) and Melissa (Victoria Jackson) head to a health resort for singles to meet men. Filmmaker Robert, working from a script by Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll, delivers a perpetually sluggish comedy that suffers from an almost total dearth of laughs, and it’s clear, certainly, that the movie’s far-from-captivating atmosphere is compounded by an episodic narrative that is, for the most part, more miss than hit. (There isn’t, ultimately, a single sequence here that manages to elicit anything more than an ambivalent shrug from the viewer.) And although the two stars are relatively charming (and Andrew Dice Clay is surprisingly convincing as a romantic lead), Casual Sex?‘s inability to transform the protagonists into wholeheartedly compelling and sympathetic figures, coupled with Stacy and Melissa’s fairly pointless fourth-wall breaking, paves the way for a decidedly anticlimactic third act that cements the picture’s place as a watchable yet completely forgettable ’80s comedy.

** out of ****

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