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Outside of "Romance," movies this year have offered no more honest image of sex than Tara Reid's face in that movie as she finally consents to lose her virginity when things seem perfect and finds the whole experience just awful. She seems just as in touch with her emotions here, and she's got a palpably neurotic edge, but it's a stinker of a role, her emotionalism at the service of tripe.

Anonymous as most of the cast is, they also have about as much control over the design and effect of the film as the characters joining in the dance of death at the close of "The Seventh Seal." This is a movie where everything is burdened with impending doom. Each drink is one step along the road to alcohol abuse; every feeling of lust one inch closer to sexual violence. Each expressed desire to let loose or get crazy marks the character as either a victim (if they're female) or a victimizer (if they're male). It's all thuddingly obvious. And since the last section of the movie -- where Reid's aspiring actress accuses Jerry O'Connell's football player of raping her -- is meant to be about the ambiguities of sex, the filmmakers don't even seem to be paying attention to the movie they're making.

O'Connell makes his entrance in the locker-room shower announcing on his cell phone, "If pussy's on the menu, I'm there!" He can't greet a buddy without body-locking the guy and hoisting him off his feet; can't escort a date from a club without slinging her over his shoulder. This is a guy whom we're asked to believe might not be a date rapist? It's not a question of being aggressive or macho, but one of the characters being presented as a caveman (and of O'Connell being allowed to practically eat the camera).

"Body Shots" is one of those rare movies that is so astonishingly vapid it actually manages, in some places, to get taken seriously, as some of the early reviews indicate. I was happier to see my 20s go than I was my teens. It can be a rotten time. But I can't imagine even the most dissatisfied people in their 20s not spotting this movie's phoniness, it's conventional, uptight morality passed off as frankness.

"Sometimes, ya just gotta come," says one character. And sometimes ya just gotta go. If I hadn't had the professional responsibility of seeing this swill through to the end, I woulda went.
salon.com | Oct. 26, 1999

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