Ex With Benefits

In the closing moments of Ex With Benefits, our protagonist talks about pain and how pain is not something to be avoided, but to be confronted. Pain tells us that we are injured; pain helps us heal. That may be the only relevant thing anyone says in the film, as this movie was a bit painful to watch.

The "Ex" in Ex With Benefits refers to the couple of Adam (Derek Ramsay) and Arki (Colleen Garcia), two med students who break up due to a misunderstanding and a gross lack of communication. They meet up ten years later, with Adam turning into a hotshot sports doctor and Colleen turning into a Med Rep.

Therein lies one of Ex With Benefits' largest flaws: it is predicated on a huge conflict of interest, as Colleen tries to gain favor with her product by sleeping around. She unceremoniously tries this on Adam, with varying results. The film has an opportunity to break the genre and present this as an unconventional relationship, but the movie plays it straight rom-com, which makes the whole thing feel disturbing. (Even more disturbing is that the audience didn't care about the situation at all; at this point I thought someone could probably make a rom com about serial philanderers who eat babies and the audience will pretty much lap it up as long as it stars the right people.) The movie even ends with a transition from one ethical breach (doctor and med rep) to another ethical breach (teacher and student) and treats it as a happy end.

Aside from this, Ex With Benefits has no shortage of unlikable characters, a trend I've noticed ever since The Animals. Of the main characters, the most sympathetic is Adam, whose faults we can mostly attribute to honest misunderstandings. Arki's character is chaotic and I don't understand most of her decisions. Most of her early problems could easily be solved by a few honest conversations. I've found it really hard to empathize with even a single character from either The Animals, #Y or this film. I don't blame Santos for this, as he makes otherwise technically proficient films. If anything, it's the screenwriter who wrote for all three films that I'd point to as the cause.

There was an issue raised among Med Reps who call the film an insult to their profession, as on the surface the two Med Rep characters sleep around to sell their product. In defense of the film, this is not the case at all, as a scene in the end categorically depicts this practice as wrong. If anything, it throws shade at the doctors who don't get a similar scene, and none of the doctors in the film are penalized for the unethical things they do in the film.

I'm not insulted, though. As a doctor, personally, I have heard of a bunch of doctors that are for all intents and purposes as corrupt and amoral as the ones depicted here. I'm personally more miffed at the family of one of the other characters, Scarlet, who bandy around the phrase "saving lives" as some sort of mantra, but actually come off as insufferable and arrogant pricks who use these noble principles as a pissing contest.

In terms of medical facts the film gets a lot of things right, and some things wrong (how can either Etoricoxib and Mefenamic Acid be called "100% Herbal?" What?) Technically the film is proficient enough, and both leads are decent actors and have good chemistry when they are together, but with this script, you can only do so much.

As the film ended I couldn't help but wonder if this was deliberate, that we are supposed to hate these people and the movie is actually a subversion of the romantic comedy genre that I thought was having a creative resurgence in recent months. In that respect, this film is genius. Then again, I may be giving these people too much credit.