The Back-Up Plan (2010)

Let's be honest. I had very few expectations going into The Back-Up Plan. I got to say it's almost impressing how they managed to still fail so miserably in reaching the few I had.

Writer Kate Angelo and director Alan Poul has one thing in common. Both are unfamiliar with movies, as both have been doing TV-work on each end up until now. It's no excuse to deliver such an insanely poorly written script and yet managing to direct it with a leading duo without chemistry and no timing skills on how to direct the scenes.

There's a reason only Jennifer Lopez' name is at the cover, besides the obvious reason she's got a name in the industry and Alex O'Loughlin is a TV-actor trying to branch out into Hollywood. He's also lacking believability, he seems to miss all his cues and on these notes; what's up with the recent romantic comedy male-casting of Hollywood?

O'Loughlin? Josh Duhamel? Matthew Goode? Jay Baruchel? Ashton Kutcher? Steve Carell? Gerard Butler? The genre is going to hell on an express route and every casting agent in town seems to do their best to help making sure of it. Now I can live with a couple of the mentioned actors getting leading romantic comedy roles and also forgive a couple because of their obvious female eye-candy skills, but overall it's a sad time trying to enjoy the romantic comedy genre these days.

It's been a while since J-Lo was the hippest babe singing, dancing and eye-candying Hollywood movies like no-one else, and she's on the grown-up side of 40 these days. She still looks great, but it's also nice to see her embracing the less glamorous side of aging without feeling sorry for herself. I guess having twins on her own a couple of years ago is reason enough to excuse her participating in this movie, but just barely.

I know I haven't said a lot about this movie, but it's such a piece of shit I just haven't got a clue where to begin. It's spilling cliches everywhere, recycling ideas from every other story made about pregnant women and it's without chemistry, intelligent dialogue or a decent storyline whatever. It's just painful to get through. And they had to throw in a single mom support group with man-issues and a crazy birth-scene? Not like we haven't seen both before.

I think they had something when they began thinking about inseminated pregnancy and then finally meeting Mr. Right straight after, with the obstacles or humor that brings along. It's not like it's a far fetched idea these days with modern working women having the same time issues as everyone else trying to have careers. Sadly they had no idea what kind of story to choose from there. They just brainstormed and ended up throwing every idea into the script. Avoid this movie like the plague it is.