Meet Avery (Mika Abdalla). She’s top of her class, headed to MIT in the fall and gearing up to dominate STEMcon, AKA her very own version of prom. But Avery has a big problem, one that, in her eyes, threatens to completely overshadow her impressive academic accolades. Her long-distance boyfriend, hunky science-guy Casper (Mason Versaw), wants to take their relationship to the next level. The issue? Avery has no idea what goes where.
Herein lies the chief tension of Sex Appeal. Every teen sex comedy’s got one: The motley crew of the American Pie movies put themselves through the wringer in an attempt to contain their raging hormones, the protagonists of Superbad embark on an urgent mission to lose their respective virginities before college and Easy A’s Olive is desperate to sustain her reputation as the most promiscuous girl at her California high school. Sex Appeal follows suit. The film dutifully gives this beloved subgenre a fresh face by drawing attention to its formula and the nitty-gritty minutiae of preparing to lose your virginity. In order to master the art of sex, Avery sets out to create an app that is guaranteed to help those wanting for sex to easily and skillfully hack the act. She recruits her childhood best friend Larson (Jake Short) for help, and the two embark in a flurry of perfectly awkward sexual experiments.
A great deal of Sex Appeal’s appeal lies in its high-concept premise. A teenager who approaches losing her virginity like coding Java enhances the scientific makeup of a film that already has many elements of a successful comedy: A racy goal, huge margin for comical errors and mishaps, and a core that bubbles with romantic potential. But by the third act, Sex Appeal is so uncomfortably contorted in an effort to neatly package itself into a pre-established framework that it squanders that potential.
A lot of this can be boiled down to one simple variable: Avery. Instead of portraying Avery as a normal teen who is nervous about her first sexual exploit (a very normal affliction), director Talia Osteen and screenwriter Tate Hanyok reduce her to a caricature—a decision born most likely from the knowledge that a character with cartoonishly clear wants, goals and personality traits will make the film’s message more easily decipherable. More than anything, Sex Appeal is determined not to let us forget that Avery is smart. Very, very, very smart. She’s—dare I say—not like other girls. And yet, when it comes to her social life, Avery is probably the most clueless person at her high school. Part of the film’s humor is attributed to Avery’s profound lack of understanding surrounding the male or female body, which is confusing when considering her scientific savvy, and borderline preposterous given the constant sex-positivity that her three moms have spewed at her since she was a tot. At one point, Danica McCollum (Paris Jackson) teaches Avery how to masturbate, and the latter’s’ utter incredulity makes me doubt that she has ever even cracked open a science textbook, let alone is on the path to becoming one of the world’s leading STEM scholars.