Secondhand Reviews: "The Back Up Plan"

Rated PG-13 for sexual situations (no nudity) and strong language.

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You can't seem to do a romantic comedy these days without having some really high concept gimmick at the center. Nobody wants to see a regular story about regular people going through normal events, even if it's written and directed in a clever, inventive way. Gotta be a gimmick. Problem is, when a gimmick is really all you have going for you, you aren't going to care about the people in the movie, and little things like empathy, actual humor, or unexpected twists, which can add so much to a story, all fall by the wayside. That's the main, and very valuable, lesson to take from "The Back Up Plan"... the first half of it, anyhow. As you'll see (assuming you haven't already, and the speed with which it has reached the second run theatres would suggest you haven't), this is a rather szchizophrenic movie.

In "The Back Up Plan", a young woman who runs a store providing the usual products and services to pets (as well as a good deal more) finally decides she has to give up looking for Mr. Right and start a family on her own. She desperately wants children, but she can't wait for the perfect guy. So she gets artificially inseminated. Then, later THAT VERY SAME DAY, she actually meets Mr. Right. So the story quickly becomes: how to form a relationship without telling him her secret; how will he react to her secret once he does find out... and how is she going to keep it a secret once she finds out she IS pregnant? At least, that's what it's about until roughly halfway through the movie. You'll see what I mean by that.

I've found that a movie that opens up with cutesy animated opening credits is usually a movie that's telling you "be afraid, be very afraid"... and I don't mean that in the good way. For the first 50 or so minutes, that's exactly what you get in "The Back Up Plan". The whole thing is completely hokey, artificial, forced (place the adjective of your choice here). Nobody acts like anyone you've ever met in real life, and characters seem to go out of their way to humiliate themselves in order to keep secrets that absolutely nobody really cares about. Then, of course, there's the unbearably "precious" music score accompanying scenes of Lopez finding it difficult to take her pregnancy test because her dog is in the room watching. And, hey, who was it out there who just asked whether the dog winds up getting the test into its mouth before Lopez can see the results? Congradulations, you're now fully qualified to write big studio romantic comedies!

Then something strange happens. Apparently the filmmakers decided that since they've now successfully sold the ticket and the audience has watched the movie to the halfway point, the gimmick worked and we can forget about it now (just as well, since there wasn't anywhere else they could have taken it by that point). So the gimmick disappears, and the story changes into one about a couple who perhaps GOT TO the point of pregnancy through unorthodox means, but now that they're there, are going through all the standard pregnancy events... birthing classes, parenting classes, financial concerns (how can we afford this child?), and so on. The second half of the movie is not by any means a great film or stunningly original, but it is at a number of points actually funny, and at its very least is cute and amusing. Reason being that once the story is no longer about the gimmick, it has nowhere else to go but to become about the characters, and that's nearly always more interesting than a movie about a gimmick.

There's some curious casting in this picture. Lopez and Alex O'Loughlin as her Mr. Right are both rather bland and colorless in the first half (and Lopez is more than a little too manic), but in the second part they settle into a comfortable groove and have some nice moments and even a bit of chemistry together. Lopez's grandmother is played by TV's "Alice", Linda Lavin, and her "financee" by Tom Bosley of "Happy Days", and while it's kind of interesting to see these sitcom veterans in these different roles, neither of them really has enough to do. Robert Klein, one of the all-time great stand-up comedians, plays Lopez's gynecologist, mostly as a straight man, but he does have one really funny scene in which he attempts to make O'Loughlin more comfortable about accompanying her to his office and doesn't exactly succeed. But the stand-out is actually Anthony Anderson as a three-time dad that O'Loughlin meets and befriends in a local park. His stories to O'Loughlin about the impending sweetness and moments of terror he's about to go through are pricelessly funny, and while I won't spoil anything for you, watch for the moment when his youngest son climbs up on his lap and Anderson tells his friend that this is one of those moments he was talking about that makes it all worthwhile. You will NOT expect what happens next.

I've seen way too many comedies that begin promisingly and then fall apart in the middle, so I'm certainly accustomed to movies that become something completely different later on than they were at the beginning. But you almost never see a film that does that in quite the way that "The Back Up Plan" does. I can't really advise you to go to the theatre to see it and then walk in about halfway through... that isn't something most theatres will allow you to do these days anyhow. But perhaps eventually you'll be able to rent it on DVD and then skip the first 50-some minutes and pick it up at the point where it gets more interesting. You already know the basic premise... that is to say, you know the gimmick... which means you already know all you need to know about the first half. Seriously... you're not missing a thing.