What can be said about a movie that can’t even get its lame concept right?
What might have been a clichéd but amusing look at the laugh-riot that is pregnancy is instead an unfocused, crudely assembled waste of varying degrees of talent.
In addition to harping on familiar "truths" about pregnancy (the mood swings, the discomfort) and playing them for laughs, What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers:
Swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker cooing in a Southern drawl
Dennis Quaid mugging to embarrassing effect through his role as a good ol’ boy ex-NASCAR driver
A couple of "don't they look fit and fab" shots of Jennifer Lopez and Cameron Diaz
Of the three pregnant women in the film, only Elizabeth Banks’s character is consistently played for easy laughs (she farts and blames it on the baby; she wets herself and blames it on the baby; she tells her hubby (Ben Falcone) she wants to mash his face).
Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford are also aboard for this mess, presumably to appeal to a younger demographic, because they don’t do much else. When the movie dares to introduce a bit of reality into the proceedings, it proves to be a mere gesture in a film that has no business being anything more than a silly comedy. Kendrick gets pregnant early on, suffers a miscarriage and then disappears from nearly the rest of the movie before a token reappearance at the end. Banks’s character loses a lot of blood following her C-section, and Falcone briefly wrings his hands in the waiting area before the nurse announces his wife is doing just fine.
What to Expect musters a few laughs out of a cliquish group of dorky dads (Chris Rock among them) pushing strollers, but these scenes feel like they’ve been spliced in from another movie (probably one produced by Adam Sandler), tied to the rest of the film by the flimsiest of conceits. Likewise, connections are casually revealed — Falcone was a contestant on Diaz’s Biggest Loser-inspired show; Kendrick’s character is related to Decker’s — that are neither enlightening nor entertaining.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2012.