DVD Reviews

The Back Up Plan

• Rating:
• Director: Alan Poul.
• Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Alex O'Loughlin, Michaela Watkins, Anthony Anderson.
• Details: US / 106mins (15A).

Jennifer Lopez hasn’t been the lead in a rom-com in yonks and by the look of The Back-Up Plan nothing has changed since she was away. The movie kicks off with the usual rom-com clichés but then something happens - it gets better; only slightly but I would take anything above the norm when it comes to the genre at this stage. Zoe (Lopez) always thought she'd be married with kids by her late thirties but that hasn’t happened and it's time for her back-up plan: when we first meet her she's being artificially inseminated. On her way home, she bumps into the handsome Stan (O'Loughlin) and they click. However, as luck would have it, Zoe finds that she's already pregnant. Being the honest woman she is, Zoe comes clean and she and Stan try to make it work... If you wished that Knocked Up could have been a little less about Seth Rogan and little more about Katherine Heigl, then The Back-Up Plan is for you. Here, the immature-overweight-loser-stoner Rogan has morphed into handsome-romantic-struts-about-on-his-farm-with-shirt-off O'Loughlin. The first hour is common rom-com fare - perfect guy meets perfect girl, they flirt, enjoy a disastrous first date, no one says anything interesting, etc. The romance element is too rushed and obvious. Then The Back-Up Plan unexpectedly ups the ante: it turns into the worries of impending parenthood (and for the most part the movie concentrates on Stan's doubts that he won't be able to provide rather than Zoe's). The gags, although still far from thigh-slappers, resonate in the real world. But that's not what the movie is about - the movie is about a pillow, or to be more accurate, what the pillow represents. The Back-Up Plan is really about the redundancy of men as a sex - Zoe might like a guy in her life but she doesn’t need one to have a baby. When Zoe falls pregnant she has a special pillow to sleep on and it puts Stan out; another father at a playground laments the introduction of the pillow too. Stan isn't having it, though - he comes home, tosses the pillow out the window, takes his shirt off and slides into bed beside her. 'Hey, you need me', he seems to be saying. Maybe I'm reading into it too much but I've an inkling writer Kate Angelo (her first script after contributing to numerous TV sit-coms) would agree with me. Glossy and predictable stuff, The Back-Up Plan's change in gears saves it from being truly awful.

Review by Gavin Burke