Nick Jonas kisses his purity-ring days of the Jonas Brothers bye-bye with Careful What You Wish For, an erotic thriller so by-the-numbers and yet diluted, it may as well be titled Basic Instinct for Beginners.
Acting through a series of drooping bottom lips, the youngest Jo Bro headlines as Doug, a teenaged virgin home for summer vacation. He’s hired by investment banker Elliot Harper (Insidious: Chapter 3’s Dermot Mulroney, nailing the Rich Asshole part) to keep the man’s sailboat in tiptop shape for the insultingly low hourly wage of 12 bucks. An unmentioned fringe benefit: close proximity to Mr. Harper’s much younger trophy wife, Lena (Isabel Lucas, 2014’s The Loft), an overly lithe, living Barbie who thinks nothing of bathing in the nude in broad daylight in peekaboo showers on the public dock — a lot of prepositional phrases for such a simplistic setup.
Yes, of course they’re totally gonna do it. And of course Lena talks smack of her husband to Doug, saying, “You have no idea what he’s capable of.” And of course their affair will lead to mortal danger. Too faithfully, director Elizabeth Allen (Ramona and Beezus) follows the modern template of sex-infused noir throwbacks established by Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, so that little of significance is new and plot turns can be spotted far in advance. What Allen does do differently is render the proceedings oddly sexless, meaning that while the movie is filled with couplings between Lena and Doug, nudity is limited to bare backsides and (if this even counts) rain turning Lena’s shirt see-through.
First-time feature screenwriter Chris Frisina juices the dialogue so that every line of Elliot’s is laced with elbow-jutting innuendo, from “Anything worth doing is worth doing all the way” to “This hasn’t been thoroughly caulked,” and the joke calls too much attention to itself to work. Frisina also appears to draw inspiration from Armageddon’s infamous animal-crackers seduction scene, with Doug rolling an Oreo cookie down Lena’s bare hips and legs. Restraint is shown by not allowing Doug to pull them open and lick the cream; somewhere, Michael Douglas volunteers to show this young pup how it’s done. —Rod Lott