Review: The Back-Up Plan

I'd like for all those people, including some of my friends, who complained about Kick-Ass to turn their critical gaze in another direction. Look towards another movie, one that is far more offensive and dangerous. If one can't find something in The Back-Up Plan to outright loathe then they're too busy looking at Jennifer Lopez's rear end to notice.  Dangerous because if people, and I'm looking at you ladies specifically, get all goo-goo eyed over this flick they'll never stop.

J-Lo can be a remarkably charming actress with the right material. Here, her character is a preening shrew named Zoe. Zoe's feeling the old biological clock tickin' in her ear, and for whatever reason she can't find the right man. According to her, she's dated "hundreds of guys", which leads me to suspect that Zoe is either very "social" or she has the personality of a doorknob. It's the latter. She works at a pet store and has adopted a crippled terrier named Nuts. I'm assuming if he was healthy he'd have run away long before now. At least he gets plenty of close-ups.

Zoe's reached the point where she no longer cares to find the perfect father of her non-existent children, so she decides to get inseminated. As a general rule, insemination jokes simply aren't funny, a fact that appears to have escaped the writers here. To say that what happens next is forced and contrived is to do an injustice to shoehorns everywhere. She dives into a cab to get out of the rain, lo and behold at the exact moment Stan(Alex O'Loughlin) is trying to do the same. Awwwwwww.

Do they get along at first? Of course not. Do they keep running into eachother all of a sudden at the oddest places? Absolutely. It's almost like they were living in some weird film world where normality has been replaced by persistent happenstance. And Stan is one heckuva catch, ladies. I know that dating cheese farmers ranks right up there at the top of your Must-List, somewhere between 'doctor' and 'NFL Quarterback'. Stan's a nice enough sort, although he doesn't seem completely real. He falls for Zoe way too fast considering her only personality trait seems to be her inability to be completely honest.

Explaining what happens next is like reliving that time a bee stung me in my groin area. If I think hard enough it's almost like the pain is still there. Zoe and Stan hit it off, she finds out she's pregnant, and he's just enough of a bachelor to make it uneasy for her to spring the news to him. His reaction is predictably telegraphed. Let the awkward couple hijinks begin.

When did it become fashionable for comedies to start showing WAAAAAYYYY too much of the child birthing process? Who greenlit this? Was it Judd Apatow in Knocked Up? I'd like to have a word, sir. There's a disturbing lack of subtlety in highlighting the many...er, changes that take place in a woman's body. Do I really need to see the end result of the doctor pulling the sonogram device out of a woman's private area? My stomach's doing cartwheels just thinking about it. Water births are now also completely out of the question.

I'm genuinely wondering who this was intended for? It can't be for women ,can it? Zoe isn't exactly a paragon of female virtue. She's not having kids out of some innate desire for motherhood, or at least it's not presented as such. The pregnancy is a novelty. Something to be obsessed over. It's no different than a movie like Bride Wars or Confessions of a Shopaholic. All of these stories paint women in the exact same light and it isn't flattering.

From the very moment the CBS Films logo flashes across the screen, The Back-Up Plan feels like the two hour premier of some long forgotten sitcom. The characters are shallow, their friends are even less defined and might as well not exist. Don't even get me started on the awful stereotypes of lesbians(disguised as "single mothers with pride"!) and old people(think conga lines to rock music!). The only possible saving grace was Jennifer Lopez, and the bland script does everything in it's power to make her as unappealing as she's ever been.

Women like to argue that we men will never know the pain of childbirth. Maybe not, but I think I've found something comparable. That's gonna be one lonely Guttenberg down there....