Review for The Back-up Plan

Jennifer Lopez reminds me of the old saying 'Jack of all trades, master of none'. Singer, actress, entrepreneur, it seems there's nothing she hasn't tried and nothing she's mastered. No more can that be more apparent than in her acting. Though it started off well in Out of Sight, after this she has starred in nothing but awful films, topped off by the Razzie 'award winning' Gigli. This film? No change.

The Back-up Plan tells the story of Zoe (Lopez), a successful businesswoman who has decided to stop waiting around for the right guy to come along and give her a baby and just to take the matter into her own hands. She gets herself artificially inseminated and it seems that's that. Until she bumps into Stan (Alex O'Loughlin) who owns his own farm and of course they fall in love. The problem of course is that now she has found the man of her dreams and she is pregnant. Stan has to adjust to all of this and does so with a romantic chivalry not seen since the Middle Ages. He is willing to support her and the kids, goes to birthing classes and even has a custom-made pram made for her.

Of course they inevitably get into a fight and Zoe breaks off the relationship. It is only later on that she discovers that Stan would be there for her no matter what and that they will make a great couple.

Extras a woefully lacking on this Blu-ray, consisting of only a handful of deleted scenes which add nothing to the film and a 'making of' documentary that told me nothing about why the film was made other than they liked the script. Though I would have hated to listen to a commentary a blooper reel might have been a good extra-then maybe I would have got some laughs out of this.

My brain hurt from watching this film. In fact, I watched this film feeling sick at just how twee and middle-class it all was. In that Marley and Me way, the couple had no problems that affect the average pregnant couple, there seemed to be no financial or even personal issues throughout other than Stan having to come to terms with being the father of (technically) another man's baby. If you were watching this film, you would think that getting pregnant is easy and by IVF even easier (It's reported that there is a 10% chance of being pregnant by one rotation of IVF and yet of course Zoe is pregnant on the first try.). At points I wasn't sure whether I should laugh or just hold my head in my hands at the clichéd setup that the film presented us with and this made the film at times unwatchable. The backup plan for this film is to not watch it at all.