Making a categorical judgment such as “all romantic comedies are bad” is entirely pointless, not because it isn’t true but because it’s just way too easy. Therefore, the rule should be amended to, “Every romantic comedy with a female star named Jennifer is guaranteed to be godawful.”
One need only mention recent critical failures Valentine’s Day (Jennifer Garner), Love Happens (Jennifer Aniston) and He’s Just Not That Into You (Aniston, Jennifer Connelly) before the point is proven with a groan.
In this instance, the Jennifer in question is Jennifer Lopez (El Cantante) and the film is The Back-up Plan. Its title is a reference to her aging, successful pet store owner Zoe’s decision to be artificially inseminated after striking out with the men of New York City. Just as Zoe writes off ever finding “the one,” the laws of introductory screenwriting act so that she finds cheese farmer Stan (Alex O’Loughlin, Whiteout) after a chance meeting caused by them hailing the same cab.
Are there really no better methods for screenwriters to force their leads to collide than the meeting-in-a-taxi scenario? Judging by the frequency of this lazy, hackneyed device, OkCupid should have already lost its customer base to the New York Taxi Cab industry.
Poor Stan is thrust uncomfortably into the modern male lead’s simple seductive binary. He has to play the masculine ideal at first, taming farm animals and living shirtless for large amounts of time. Then, he needs to be humanized through fainting spells, slapstick mishaps and accidental arson. Women may want him, but men will assuredly cringe at the prospect of ever being forced to spend time with him.
Lopez must be given credit for expanding her range enough to play someone whose Puerto Rican ancestry is not clear. It’s plausible enough that she’s named Zoe, but the filmmakers may have pushed their post-racial luck a bit far when they gave Lopez an apparently Jewish grandmother whom she calls Nana.
Even though the film is conceptually harmless and exists in the most numbing genre known to man, The Back-up Plan contains odd, misplaced and occasionally offensive helpings of locker room raunchiness. “Have you seen my vagina?… I will show you my vagina,” warns friend, mother of three and owner of a decimated vagina, Mona (Michaela Watkins, Yoga Matt). In fact, all of Lopez’s female buddies are bawdy enough to replace the bros from Hot Tub Time Machine.
As with any Lopez film, her derriere becomes a reliable punchline. In Monster-In-Law, it was her inability to fit a dress over said body part. Here, its degradation in quality following the pregnancy is thoroughly examined.
The Farrelly brothers-esque animal hygiene humor in the film is just as bad as it sounds. Zany physical comedy fills out the rest of the strained comedic oeuvre. A Knocked Up-style aping, full frontal birth shot is thrown in for extra shock value.
Constant use of the word vagina and extremely graphic explorations of everything birth-related is admirable for its stigma busting intentions. In practice, however, the filmmakers express quite juvenile attitudes, replacing the current comedic gold mines of weed and scatology with birthing, babies and all the sticky, messy, dirty things both entail.
If The Back-up Plan fails at the box office as it sorely deserves to, then the paltry sales can be viewed as part of a wider cultural backlash against Lopez’s creative ventures. The lead singles from her album flopped spectacularly, and mankind has yet to find anyone who laughed during her Saturday Night Live hosting gig.
The Back-up Plan is a movie constructed around Lopez’s now tiresome personality, and it is as good a case as any for leaving the traditional romantic comedy — and all the Jennifers who continue to produce them — out of the new decade.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 1 out of 5 stars
