Casting earned their money on this one. Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, The Hunger Games’s Elizabeth Banks, Oscar-nominated Anna Kendrick, Gossip Girl’s Chase Crawford, Glee’s Mat- thew Morrison – the list is endless. With this range of talent the film is a sure box office smash, right? Wrong. This fabulous array of talent cannot detract from the lack of real direction from which this film suffers.
Watching different women take various routes to become pregnant and following them and their partners until birth is neither romantic nor funny. This rules out rom-com and makes you wonder what genre this film is supposed to fill. The comedy is in the misrepresentation of pregnancy in this film. The majority of pregnant women would probably laugh at the shiny actors, the lack of making-ends-meet couples, and clicheÌ after clicheÌ about ‘it all being worth it’. Not to mention the five-minute painless birth scenes.
The plot revolves around five different couples, who have become parents -by adoption in the case of Holly and Alex, by ‘miracle baby’ in the case of Wendy and Gary, and by one-night stand in the case of Rosie and Marco.
You wait for all these couples to link up and for the side-splittingcomedy to begin.And you wait a long time. Eventually most of them seem to end up in hospital together but they don’t actually meet, and the connections which do exist are very tenuous. Not to unite a cast like this feels like screenwriting lunacy.
Overall it’s difficult to know who this film is for. Those with children will be bored by the misrepresentation of it all and those without will hate the smugness of the buggy brigade. It would help if this was offset by some comedy but laughs are thin on the ground, and the script resorts to comments like ‘She’s like a magical pregnancy unicorn!’ or J-Lo’s declaration, ‘It’s a miracle, isn’t it!’ All I can say is that it’s a miracle this film ever managed to get made.
