Review of For Keeps (1988) by Catherine S — 03 May 2011

For Keeps is a decent teen film that shows the life of a pregnant teen and while it's tolerable, it's nothing special that leaves the viewer unsatisfied.

Our main character is Darcy, an "A" student who dreams of being a journalist, and her boyfriend Stan who is attending CalTech. During a "fling", Darcy becomes pregnant even though she had been taking the pill before hand. Instead of aborting the baby or putting it up for adoption, the two at the ever all seeing ages of 19 and 17 decide to keep the baby and even get married, even though the parents on both sides strongly disagree and kick the two out. The young couple try to keep everything together and for a while it works, until the birth of their daughter Theodocia. Things begin to fall apart as Darcy and Stan try to keep everything together.

I understand that this film is an important one and that it talks about teen pregnancy and what your life could be like if you had a child at 17, but this film takes a lot of liberties. The treatment and lifestyle of the couple is softened to the point of laugh worthy. I've had friends who got pregnant at around the same age, and believe me, it was a lot harder than what was shown in the movie. The acting is very subpar and the humor that they tried to inject into the movie felt very forced and uncomfortable. The final nail in the coffin is just that it's incredibly boring to watch. While I can see this film being shown to kids in a health class (that's where I first watched this film), anyone outside of that group will not be interested.

If this film was more realistic, then I'd probably excuse the issues I stated above. But the fact that it isn't realistic and makes teen pregnancy look easy just lowers the credibility. Overall, if you want a good teen pregnancy movie, just watch Juno. It's better acted, more realistic, and just is a better film. (Real rating:42%).