The 10 most unnecessary sex scenes of all time
Sex scenes often have a purpose on film, whether that’s to inform storyline developments, deepen the connection between two characters, or further underline a recurring emotional or thematic motif.
On the other side of the coin, though, they can just as easily feel forced in for little other reason than throwing up a major talking point, causing gasps in a packed multiplex, or getting audiences hot under the collar.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be one or the other when the humble act of on-screen copulation can be everything from hilarious to sensual via horrifying and disturbing. Sometimes, it can even feel as if it doesn’t even belong on-screen at all, leaving the majority of viewers feeling as if what they just witnessed wasn’t even unnecessary.
In the case of the following ten movies, the sex scene could be removed entirely, and it wouldn’t do a thing to alter the final product, which in some cases wasn’t even anything to write home about anyway.
The 10 most unnecessary sex scenes:
10. Domino (Tony Scott, 2005)
The life of Domino Harvey was a fascinatingly tragic one, with the daughter of Laurence Harvey abandoning a modelling career to move to Los Angeles to work as a DJ, ranch hand, volunteer firefighter, and, ultimately, bounty hunter. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate to Tony Scott’s dramatisation.
A critical and commercial disaster, Keira Knightley plays Harvey in an action thriller that was trashed by critics and bombed at the box office, which saw Scott’s visual flourishes sit ill-at-ease with its overwrought dramatics and borderline-incomprehensible plot, which manifested most clearly in a jarring sex scene.
Knightley’s Harvey and Édgar Ramírez’s Choco are involved in a near-fatal car crash, deciding that being stranded in the desert following a near-death experience is the ideal time and place to act on their latent sexual tension. Not only does it feel unnecessary in a film that was already flirting with the exploitative, but it’s also suggested within the context of the story that the entire thing is a hallucination, rendering it even more obsolete in a semi-biographical genre flick that was already gratuitous enough as it was.
9. The Mule (Clint Eastwood, 2018)
The Mule is inspired by the true story of Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran who became a drug runner for a Mexican cartel in his 80s. Clint Eastwood‘s movie is a solid and no-frills crime thriller rooted in reality, but having the octogenarian star bedding two women young enough to be his grandchildren wasn’t needed.
In fact, there are two separate threesomes in the film, and while it’s admirable to try and break down the barriers regarding any perceived age limit on who can or can’t be in a sex scene, even doing it once feels self-indulgent, considering Eastwood starred in, produced, and directed The Mule.
There’s even a wish-fulfilment shot of a much younger man gazing enviously at what’s occurring right across the street from him, making it the cinematic equivalent of Eastwood having his cake and eating it too, at least relative to the rampant virility he’s trying to project that doesn’t exactly have a whole lot to do with the story.
8. Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)
Nobody’s going to deny that the beast with two backs was created regularly during medieval times by everyone from the peasants to the nobility, but Excalibur stands out for shoehorning a sex scene into the movie that’s every bit as nonsensical as it is unnecessary.
Gabriel Byrne’s Uther Pendragon has assumed the visage of Corin Redgrave’s Duke Gorlois thanks to a spell cast by Nicol Williamson’s Merlin, which he uses to his advantage by bedding Katrine Boorman’s Igraine. For reasons unbeknownst to anyone but director John Boorman, his daughter was required to be partially nude while her scene partner wears a full suit of armour.
It does at least serve a storytelling function, seeing as this is where the future King Arthur is conceived, but beyond the questionable family dynamic, the scene carries on for far too long and exists somewhere between horror and cheese in the way it unfolds. There were surely plenty of vastly superior options on the table in terms of execution, and some simple exposition would have done everyone a favour and spared their eyes.
7. Drive Angry (Patrick Lussier, 2011)
Patrick Lussier’s supernatural action-packed fantasy is a deeply silly movie, one that features Nicolas Cage giving a deeply silly performance, which carries on right through one of the deeply silliest sex scenes in recent memory.
During a tryst with Amber Heard’s Piper Lee, Cage’s John Milton is interrupted by a raft of goons trying to kill him, which he responds to in kind by not just gunning them all down in a mid-coital action sequence but doing so while never once contemplating the idea of removing his sunglasses.
Not only does it add nothing to the film other than aiming for cool points from its target demographic, but the exact same thing was done already – and to much greater and darkly hilarious effect – in 2007’s even more outlandish Shoot ‘Em Up.
6. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
The infamously unnecessary ‘hair sex’ scene from James Cameron’s Avatar even gave rise to a Mandela Effect, with audiences adamant that they weren’t imagining Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana’s Na’vi linking their tendrils together to become one with both each other and the planet of Pandora.
As it turns out, while the scene was included in the extended version of the film, it wasn’t present at all in the original theatrical cut, which was the right call on James Cameron’s part. After all, it’s all a bit Demolition Man in theory, with the two connecting through the collective nervous system of the Na’vi to join together on a sensory level more than a physical one.
It raises plenty of questions, though, which includes – but is not limited to – what function their genitals serve, if they even have any, if this is how they have sex, is it physical at all or purely spiritual, and if this is how they join together to get down and dirty, what does that say about how the Na’vi also use their tendrils to link with animals and trees? Whatever the answer, the unnecessarily extended scene didn’t need to exist at all.
5. Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)
Principal photography wrapped on Top Gun without a sex scene being filmed, but somebody at the studio decided that the classic airborne blockbuster was sorely lacking without one, so it was hastily added at the last minute.
Star Kelly McGillis revealed the love scene was shot five months after the rest of the film, and the reason she was seen entirely in silhouette was that she’d dyed her hair for another role, leaving the reshoot team with no choice but to rely on shadow.
Top Gun didn’t need it, but after being screened for test audiences, it was decreed that Tom Cruise’s Pete Mitchell simply couldn’t make it all the way through the movie without showcasing his penchant for lovemaking, resulting in the out-of-place sequence being shoehorned into the final cut for very little reason beyond mild titillation.
4. Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)
The sex scene in Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen is almost the textbook definition of a filmmaker searching for profundity without having the means or self-awareness of how to achieve it, with the director aiming for the sensual and getting the unintentionally hilarious instead.
The dynamic between Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl and Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II is established, deepened, and furthered just fine without having to subject audiences to an excruciating several minutes of leather-clad fornication backed to the strains of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, and its lasting legacy is that of being perhaps the most widely-ridiculed element of the entire film.
It slows the pacing to a crawl in what was already a narrative unconcerned with entertaining the notion of moving briskly, and the ejaculatory shot of an aircraft taking off is the accidentally side-splitting cherry on a cake not a single viewer wanted to taste in the first place.
3. The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003)
The Room is basically Tommy Wiseau doing whatever he wanted to do because there was nobody in the vicinity who outranked him and could tell him otherwise, leaving the wannabe film genius to indulge himself with a bellybutton-thrusting slab of cinematic madness.
One of the many urban legends surrounding the production is that both of The Room‘s sex scenes were shot on the very first day of filming, which does play into Wiseau’s belief that he was overseeing a masterpiece while offering a small measure of sympathy to his scene partner that they were out of the way quickly.
Nothing in The Room makes a great deal of sense or feels entirely necessary, but that’s especially true of a sex scene that aims for lustful longing but misses by such a wide margin that it’s impossible to believe it was scripted and captured on-camera for any other reason than to satisfy Wiseau and nobody else.
2. Howard the Duck (Willard Huyck, 1986)
Major live-action adaptations of Marvel Comics characters have come a long way since Howard the Duck, which decided that bestiality was the right way to go about winning over an audience that was already sceptical of an anthropomorphised waterfowl ushering in a bold new era for cinema.
Lea Thompson’s daughter Zoey Deutch was understandably traumatised by the scene she entirely correctly described as being one “in which my mother makes love to a duck,” and even a passing knowledge of how and why a male duck’s reproductive organs look the way they do and operate the way they operate makes it exponentially more nightmarish.
Howard the Duck would have been a terrible movie with or without the sex scene, but at the end of the day, it’s a woman having sex with a duck in a high-profile Hollywood release. If not a single person raised questions over the optics at any point during production, then the film deserved everything it got.
1. The Matrix Reloaded (The Wachowskis, 2003)
The Matrix was a leather-clad, reality-bending, and game-changing sci-fi action classic, leaving the Wachowskis with the tough task of trying to clear the insanely high bar they’d set for themselves the first time around.
By the end of the Zion-set rave that doubled as a distractingly unnecessary sex scene between Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity, it was clear that neither of the back-to-back sequels stood a chance of matching their illustrious predecessor.
Like a post-apocalyptic dystopian Coachella, the sweaty throngs of the rave are intercut with the sweatier throngs of Neo and Trinity, bumping uglies like their lives depended on it. Did the entire thing need to run for six minutes? No, it did not. Was it relevant to anything? Not so much, considering everyone knew the pair were madly in love and would do anything for – and evidently to – each other. Would The Matrix Reloaded have been any better or worse were it left on the cutting room floor entirely? Not a chance.
