Amanda FooJ Lo has been absent from the big screen since 2007, when she was last seen in the movie El Cantante with husband Marc Anthony, and The Back-Up Plan is her comeback project.
The Back-Up Plan follows Zoe (Lopez), a gorgeous yet single woman (how does that happen?) who has decided to purchase a stranger’s sperm to artificially inseminate herself because she’s tired of waiting for The One.
When leaving the clinic, however, she bumps straight into Stan, who is supposed to be The Most Perfect Man Ever, a goat-cheese farmer with aspirations of running a sustainable gourmet café.
The pair fall in love pretty much straight away, but with Zoe pregnant, the couple has to navigate hormones, money and trying to form a relationship backwards.
There aren’t any prizes for guessing if the couple survives this.
While Lopez may not be the best of actresses due to her persona as Jennifer Lopez overshadowing any role she has, she tries. It helps that she doesn’t have any issues with embarrassing herself through physical humour to coax some laughs out of the audience, like smearing her face with stew, tipping stomach-first into a taxi and falling into water that a woman has pooped into. It may not be Lopez’s first attempt at physical humor, but never has she relied on it to such an extent.
However, no matter how much effort the actress-singer-dancer puts into what was supposed to be her comeback project, this role is far from her acclaimed turn as Karen Sisco in Out Of Sight.
Alex O’Loughlin, who plays the part of Stan, also lets Lopez down.
Of course, no one is flawless, so you’ve gotta pity the guy, but to make things worse, his character comes across as creepy, aggressive and egotistical when Stan is armed with lines like “It’s too bad we’re friends, if not, I would be your best kiss.”
There is a dissonance between lines like the one above and the tender scenes, like the one in which Stan sets up a candlelit dinner in a quaint garden in the middle of the city, and this takes away from the movie.
Also, even though this was meant to be a comedy, the humour is tasteless and falls flat on its face most of the time.
In one scene, Zoe and Stan play unwilling witnesses to a live birth in a living room and there are shots of what could be either pubic hair or the emerging baby’s head. No matter what, it’s a crude humour device and has no place in a rom-com.
And if The Back-Up Plan was supposed to show audiences the joy of pregnancy, it did the opposite, serving instead to almost persuade you to take a vow of celibacy and run off into the mountains of Tibet. Because if Jennifer Lopez has so much trouble with pregnancy, what hope do we mere mortals have of an easy ride?
Too bad this movie didn’t have it’s own plan B.
For more information on The Back-Up Plan, head over to CTV‘s Movie Mania to find out more!
Title: The Back-Up Plan
Opens: May 6Duration: 104 minutes
Language: English
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Director: Alan Poul
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Alan O’Loughlin, Michaela Watkins