Jennifer's Body Reviews
Top CriticBy tapping in to the same vein of 'hormonal horror' as the excellent 'Ginger Snaps', this offers a witty, subversive look at the darker side of teen friendship.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
'Jennifer's Body': Kusama-Cody's Post-"Carrie" Horror Feminism Is Inept
The flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing.
[Cody's] glib teen-hip dialogue mostly feels like self-conscious splatter over a sorely lackluster scare flick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Apparently, there's nothing like lean and hungry times to awaken the undead.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There are probably worse ways to go out than being devoured by Fox... but the film squanders all the fun from what could have been a hilarious, gore-filled romp.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Director Karyn Kusama finds resonant terror in details: the look Anita and Jennifer exchange before Jen's fateful ride, or a victim's last-minute ah-hah.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a fun premise -- a twist on the usual girl-in-distress scenario of the standard-issue horror film -- enlivened by Codyspeak.
| Original Score: 3/5
[T]here's something a bit sour about the whole enterprise, a lack of fun that becomes more evident as the injuries and indignities piled upon poor Needy accumulate, and gradually crowd out the film's early tongue-in-cheekiness.
The tone wavers, the direction's slackly indecisive and visually drab, and in the middle of it is a thinly conceived antagonist played by Megan Fox. Honestly, she's a pretty bad actress. She doesn't seem to get Cody's sense of humor. At all.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Jennifer's Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The amateurishly directed 'Jennifer's Body' is a bust as ha-ha horror movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
I'd like to see Jennifer get transferred to that "Twilight" school and stir up some trouble.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.
[Its] depiction of the ways in which women like Needy are willing to compromise themselves to indulge an ultimately less secure friend is spot-on.
Jennifer's Body comes across as Diablo Cody lite, something she seems to have dashed off in-between talk show appearances and updating her MySpace page with her latest caustic witticisms.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Director Karyn Kusama is torn between duty to female empowerment and slasher convention. But Fox shows a comic flair that Transformers never investigated.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
As a horror movie, Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Clever one-liners don't cover the cruelty here. Jennifer is shallow. The movie about her is, too.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Takes up a common theme of slasher films - that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know - and turns it inside out.
| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's almost as if no one knows what to do with Megan Fox.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
It's a serviceable premise, but the execution fails on almost every level.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Seyfried approaches her role with such honesty and vulnerability that she transforms the movie; you see, in her bottomless blue eyes, that she long ago accepted being the girl that nobody noticed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Jennifer's Body tries hard to be cool, gross and nasty but feels forced and misses the mark.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Kusama and Cody's collaboration is a wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.
As screenwriter Diablo Cody might say in her irritatingly pop-cult way, this zombie-chick horror-satire is more dead-eyed than Blake Lively.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
You ought to have a movie that's both smart and sexy. But Jennifer's Body is neither. Most damning of all, it's not scary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Not since Brian De Palma's Carrie has a horror movie so effectively exploited the genre as a metaphor for adolescent angst, female sexuality and the strange, sometimes corrosive bonds between girls who claim to be best friends.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There is within Diablo Cody the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that's uncompromising. This isn't your assembly-line teen horror thriller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Last year, a ... horror flick called Teeth, about a ... girl who had incisors where she shouldn't, covered this territory with more creativity, complexity and humor. Jennifer's Body, for all its promise, could use some of that bite.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
While Fox's performance as a high-school girl possessed by a demon would seem key to the fortunes of the film, Amanda Seyfried, as her unlikely best friend, Needy, makes it more interesting than it would be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Cody throws one too many losses at Needy; the screenwriter loses her satiric way about halfway through. But for a while, this has real fangs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Jennifer's Body seems designed more to be quoted than watched.
Jennifer's Body is never scary and it's only sporadically amusing.
If you're in search for a way to ogle Megan Fox's body, there are a lot better ways to do it than subjecting yourself to this.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
An unoriginal and mostly unscary horror-comedy from, surprisingly, the pen of Diablo Cody.
While not exactly lifeless, Jennifer's Body sure could be fresher.
