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Sex and Death 101 is a particularly silly movie, but you'll laugh out loud in spite of yourself. The film works hard to be a dark, grown up, romantic comedy (plenty of sex, nudity, bad language and philosophy) and yet it winds up being every bit as childish as most other pictures in the genre.
Funny how that works.
Roderick Blank (Simon Baker) is a handsome, successful single man about to marry the chilly Fiona Wormwood. A supercomputer (or perhaps God) mistakenly sends Rod an e-mail that lists all the women who have been his sexual partners. The e-mail also lists the women with whom he'll have sex in the future. Wowzers. What guy wouldn't want to know in advance which women will say yes?
The list has 101 names, all in chronological order. Rod's bizarre voyage begins at his own bachelor party, when a stripper named Precious turns out to be a wedding present from his buddies. Rod isn't interested in Precious, until he looks over his list of future conquests and finds her name on it. (Well, he finds one Carlota Valdez on the list, and that is Precious' real name.) How can he resist? It's fate.
Believing that a woman's name on his list means that sex with her is a given, Rod quickly starts moving through the lengthy list. Here's the playmate, here's the older woman, here the famed lesbian couple, then the doctor, the vet, some European women and a bunch of students. You get the drift.
Rod struggles with issues of love versus sex, runs into trouble with a woman who won't sleep with him, briefly buries the list in an attempt to regain spontaneity in his life and often interacts with his male friends, who give him such nicknames as "Midas D--k" for his success with women.
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Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a mysterious killer named Death Nell is busy seducing and drugging sexual predators. Nell (Winona Ryder) seeks out men responsible for sex crimes against women and gives them a potion that puts them into a coma; she is feared by men and lauded by women everywhere. The two stories, Rod and Nell, develop side by side: the lady killer and the literal killer.
Then Rod has the good sense to look at the last name on his lover list ...
Sex and Death 101 has a handful of good lines and a couple of funny scenes, but never quite lives up to the promise of its clever story. This is the war between men and women all over again, with sequences that underline how tough it is for men to be just friends with a woman, and others that show how differently men and women look at love and sex. The movie's best laughs come from a good-natured mockery of the way men operate within relationships.
What works well is the self-deprecating humour of Simon Baker's character, Rod; Rod gets to move through the story with a combination of innocence and glee, and Baker's performance is charming enough to hold this movie together. Sex and Death 101 has a strange and oddly endearing ending, and -- unlike most romantic comedies -- it even has a few sex scenes, so all is not lost.
Just FYI, Daniel Waters, who wrote and directed Sex and Death 101, also wrote Heathers.
And there you have it.
(This film is rated 14-A)