By Will Sloan 

Another modest sex comedy from the creative team behind My Awkward Sexual Adventure (2012), The End of Sex shifts its comedy-of-awkwardness to middle-age. After sending their two adolescent daughters to camp, long-married couple Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) finally have the time and space to revive their long-dormant sex life. The problem: the ol’ black magic just doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Over the next week, they embark on a variety of sexual experiments that unfold in episodic, sketch-like fashion, and the film rises or falls on the quality of each comic idea. In other words, it usually falls—never daring to take Farrelly-sized risks, and never evoking the kinds of belly-laughs that Judd Apatow can summon at his best. Familiar comic ideas (meeting an unexpected acquaintance at a sex club; experimenting with drugs) don’t develop much beyond the initial premises, and peter out in listless dialogue of the “So… that just happened” variety. The tone becomes more serious in the last act, as Josh and Emma fall into some Eyes Wide Shut-lite extramarital jealousy/temptation, but the eventual pat re-affirmation of normalcy is never in doubt. Never less than genial, The End of Sex lacks the imagination or nerve to rise above its inevitable fate in the Tubi graveyard.

Will Sloan