Call in backup: The Back-Up Plan stinks

By Jackie Ammons     5/16/10 7:00pm

Jackie

There's nothing quite like going to a chick flick with a guy in tow; it's a test of his manliness and the likelihood he'll get a second date. However, reviewing a chick flick with Casey Michel is an ... experience. And remember, I said it was a review, not a date. But apart from the awkwardness of him announcing to the box office attendant, ticket taker and popcorn lady that we were on a date, his running commentary and yelling at the big screen during the movie was entertaining. While Casey and I both agreed it was a pretty sorry movie, here's what I took away from The Back-Up Plan.Birth control comes in many forms, and The Back-Up Plan is now one of them. The Back-Up Plan's gross depiction of natural childbirth, the emotional havoc of pregnancy and the sheer awkwardness of the artificial insemination process are more than enough to make a couple on a movie date night reconsider any special plans after the movie.

In The Back-Up Plan, Zoe (Bordertown's Jennifer Lopez) begins the road to pregnancy by asking her best guy friend (Fired Up!'s Eric Christian Olsen) to be her "baby daddy" and, after his rejection of this plan, she chooses to go through artificial insemination, during which her doctor sticks multiple bloody devices up her body.

---

---

As fate would have it, the day Zoe is inseminated, she falls in love with Stan (Whiteout's Alex O'Loughlin); the man of her dreams chooses to stay with her and father her unborn child. With the help of friend Mona (The Prankster's Michaela Watkins), Dr. Scott Harris (Demoted's Robert Klien) and Carol the birthing coach (Melissa McCarthy, "Samantha Who?"), Zoe and Stan survive her pregnancy, but not without some bumps along the way.

Essentially, the one scene depicting Zoe's friend naturally giving birth in a kiddie pool in her living room - complete with the crowning of the baby - ruins the rest of The Back-Up Plan. Granted, there are some genuinely funny moments in the movie, such as when the opposing forces of Zoe's tight cocktail dress and her pregnancy keep her from hopping into a cab, but most of the humor in this film involves references to or direct contact with bodily fluids. The writers of the script evidently thought audiences would get laughs from watching a child carrying feces from the sandbox, but the screams of the mother and Lopez falling into the pool of birthing fluids are simply too extreme and too gross.

Childbirth in real life must be painful, but sitting through a supposedly fun chick flick about a pregnant woman shouldn't be. Watching The Back-Up Plan is an extremely painful experience, and audiences shouldn't have to endure its crude humor and explicit depiction of childbirth.

Casey

There once was a time when Jennifer Lopez stood relevant. Her curvaceousstatureandher cross-culturalchopsserved as a bridge across the millennium, a beckoning of a newer, spicier America.She stoodas a promise of a surer future -or at least a future in which her originality, and her booty, never waned.

Then, she released theBack-Up Plan. And that promise, like the movie, turned into little more than an infuriating, ingratiating, hotLatina mess.

To be frank, I've never been one for half-baked rom-coms. I never thought Harry should get Sally, and I only welled up a bit inP.S. I Love You. So it comes as little surprise that the only appealThe Back-Up Planpromised was J-Lo's figure.

The premiseof this filmis simple -J-Lo can't find a father, so she goes the in-vitro route. But as soon as she learns she's pregnant, a scruffy, six-packed dairy farmer uses aw-shucks love to screw up her plans. Will their love work? Will he stick around when he learns she's pregnant? Could they ever make this thing work?

It's not simply that thefilmfound itslegs cut out from underneath in so many angles -the piss-poor acting fromAlex O'Laughin, the tinny, misplaced soundtrack,the absolute crock of aplot -but that the movie could simply never decide what it wanted to be.O'Laughinvacillated between douchebaggery and decency; thequarrelsskipped blindly from infertility to bankruptcy to love gone awry;andall thetriesat a love triangle or a quirky friend were as stunted as J-Lo's attempts at acting.

Yet you can't simply leaveThe Back-Up Planat the theater -which, I should point out, was the same theater where I watchedCloverfield, and experienced the same amount ofqueasiness.

Throughout the film you get the distinct feeling that the writers behindThe Back-Up Planwere aiming for a late-30'sKnocked Up, and, unfortunately, they followed the method down to a crowning tee, culminating with a wet, Wiccan childbirth, the likes of which turned even the most steely of stomachs into a churning massofnausea.

No scene, I suppose, better captures the essence of the filmthana wide-eyed J-Lowatching the birth,surrounded by the most unsettlingtambourines andGregorian chanting this side of the Vatican.And no scene better captures what was once a promising career. Both will want to make you retch.

---