Bantamweight but fun throughout, the movie connects consistently, both on personality and scene-to-scene joke-writing. Portman, who is rapturously photographed throughout, gets to showcase her underappreciated comedic timing. Generally positive word-of-mouth and a more streamlined marketing campaign should benefit this film, though, and make it a solid theatrical performer with significant holdover ancillary appeal.
A couple breezy set pieces establish a history between Emma Kurtzman Portman and Adam Franklin Kutcher , teenage camp friends whose romantic curiosities orbit one another but never align until the pair reunites many years later in Los Angeles.
Emma is in medical residency, Adam is a production assistant and would-be writer, as well as the son of an aging, self-centered TV star, Alvin Kevin Kline. A drunken night of attempted booty calls leads Adam back to Emma, and a curious arrangement is struck. Wanting to avoid the attendant emotional muddle of an actual relationship, Emma proposes a mutual-use physical relationship.
Hassle-free fun works for a while, but more profound feelings eventually bubble up. This same conceit — at once fluffy and throwaway, but also interested in shifts in the modern dating landscape impacted by technology and many couples waiting until much later to get married, if at all — could suffer mightily in lesser hands.
Veteran director Ivan Reitman, however, is a skilled comedy craftsman, able both to build engaging scenes and maintain some semblance of an emotional throughline. Still, No Strings Attached is a movie that has the courage to trust in its characters and the stars playing them enough to let them be a bit disagreeable or cavalier in their treatment of others, knowing that the audience will be eventually won over by the honest expression of their viewpoint.
