Review of The Back-Up Plan (2010) by Chads. — 23 Apr 2010

"We were doing fine before you came along," according to Zoe, who chastizes Stan for his semantics, when he explains to an old girlfriend that he's not the father of the baby bump. This assertion of Zoe's makes precious little sense, since the pet shop owner met the goat cheese maker on the same day she was artifically inseminated.

And on the night that Zoe learns about her successful fertilization via home pregnancy test stick and dog, she had already fallen for Stan, so mother and child were never really a unit all to themselves.

Rather than chalk up Zoe's gripe about her lost independence as a screenwriting gaffe, the nonsensical protestation can be explained by the pregnant woman's increased hormonal levels and romantic anguish.

She's upset; she doesn't know what she's saying. Due to the restrictions of romantic comedy, what Zoe is upset about, however, makes "The Back-up Plan" hopelessly pedestrian, in which certain knotty issues and emotions can't be broached, because the genre is largely escapist.

But even the most indiscriminating moviegoer may find the negation of any discourse on the A-word(especially on the mother's part) conspicuous by its absence. Whereas Stan's commitment to the unborn, at times, is marked by numerous bouts of apprehensiveness, Zoe never seems to have any regrets about her impending birth to children whose father will forever remain anonymous.

If she did, the screenplay would force the filmmaker's hand to deal with all the options that a pregnant woman faces. Zoe gets cravings and nausea, but she never gets introspective, never entertains the possibility that she could start all over with Stan.

"The Back-up Plan" doesn't want you to think about this hot-button topic, which is why the filmmaker establishes Zoe's wealth at the outset of their relationship, so when it's time for her to discover that she's having twins, there's no potentiality of the extra mouth being a financial burden to instigate some drastic measure on the Internet entrepreneur's part.

"The Back-up Plan" is about bad timing. Perhaps the back-up plan to "The Back-up Plan" entertained some dialogue to the possibility of a correction.