4. What To Expect When You’re Expecting (Dir. Kirk Jones)
The movie: Taking its cues from a very famous pregnancy book of the same name – a book which in no way follows a narrative structure or contains characters of any kind – What To Expect When You’re Expecting gathers a large ensemble cast and puts five couples through the trials and horrors of pregnancy, albeit in a way that audiences have seen a million times before in a million movies that are exactly like this one (only, uh, better).
Why it’s awful: Despite its talented cast – which consists of Cameron Diaz, Elizabeth Banks, Anna Kendrick, Chris Rock and Dennis Quaid, to name a few that you’ve heard of –Â What To Expect When You’re Expecting is a load of old drivel – a rom-com that makes zero effort to stand out from the crowd, and delivers the most obvious jokes at the most obvious points.
The crime, here, is ultimately the script, which only seems to consist of cliches and dumb dialogue clues. There’s no love or magic or passion: it’s stale and overly sentimental and utterly boring, with many of the actors just phoning in performances that seem more like tired rehearsals. I’d imagine that actually giving birth for the length of this movie’s run time would be a far less painless experience. And a much more pleasurable one, at that.
Low point:Â All of it. Every sequence struggles against banality, as if banality were a bad thing (this movie would of loved to have been banal).
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