Kevin McCarthy Movie Review 04/23/10

WASHINGTON - Jennifer Lopez is back on the big screen. Her competition at the weekend box office is a comic-book-inspired action tale and a Disney movie about the unseen world that exists in the ocean.

Kevin McCarthy, movie reviewer for 106.7 FM "The Fan”, with this week's reviews.

The Back-up Plan Review

I was thinking of starting my review off with something cheesy like, "If you were planning on seeing this film over the weekend, I hope you had a "Back-Up Plan" to see something else." Wait, I did start my review off with that. Okay well just so you know I am sure one hundred other critics will do something similar. Not that it's a bad line or anything but it's just too easy. Needless to say, the movie is rather horrendous. I am really sick and tired of saying movies are formulaic and cliché. Therefore, I am going to change it up tonight and head on over to thesaurus.com and look for synonyms of those two words to help me describe this film.

As The Joker stated in The Dark Knight, "Here we go...". The Back-Up Plan is singing the same old tune, trite, old news and completely derivative of every romantic comedy we have seen in recent years. Those are all different ways to say the film was cliché. This is kind of fun actually. Now, let's move on to the term "formulaic." The Back-Up Plan is routine, predictable, run-of-the-mill, unoriginal and usual. Again, all of these synonyms are coming from thesaurus.com even though they are words I already knew.

Knocked Up, I mean The Back-Up Plan tells the fairy-tale-like story of boy meets girl but whoops, the girl happens to be pregnant. What are they going to do? Meet Zoe (played by Jennifer Lopez), a beautiful woman in her 30's who can't seem to find Mr. Right. Right, that makes sense. No guy wants to date Jennifer Lopez! The film opens with her in the doctor's office getting artificially inseminated so that she can finally live her dream of raising a family. This is her "back-up plan." By the way, can I mention how horrendous the opening credits are? The film has this awful animated opening credit sequence that makes the film seem so amateurish. Now back to the unoriginal plot line. Immediately after she is artificially inseminated, she hails a taxi which happens to also be hailed by a ruggedly handsome gentleman by the name of Stan (played by Alex O'Loughlin). They flirt a bit, arguing over who called the cab first and go their separate ways. But as with every romantic comedy, they find each other again and start to fall for each other. Turns out that Zoe's back-up plan works and she is 100% pregnant. Now she has to battle over whether to tell him because she really likes him. You can pretty much figure out where the film goes from here.

Apart from the horrific opening credit sequence, the entire movie feels forced and already mapped out perfectly. There's nothing worse than watching a movie and being taken on a journey that you already know the ending too. That forces you to feel trapped and wanting to get out. The movie plays out exactly like a fairy-tale. Generally, I can suspend my disbelief and get connected to the characters in a cheesy romantic comedy. Granted, I did feel that Lopez and O'Loughlin had chemistry, the script was so poorly written that everything they said was predictable.

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