Movie Review: The Back-up Plan - Find Your Own

Once in awhile an actor or actress has been off the scene long enough that they decide to try for a comeback. Sometimes it works (such as John Travolta with Pulp Fiction) and sometimes the result is so mind-boggling and atrocious you wish the filmmakers would have held their water and drowned their cinematic abortion such as the likes of director Alan Poul’s debut “film,” The Back-up Plan.

Jennifer Lopez just can’t find material suited to her to save her life… or career. However, the females attending the screening I was at howled with laughter for the entire slog of 106 banal minutes of true “torture porn” for sane people. She was great in her own debut film, Selena, and used rather appropriately in her turn as a U.S. Marshal in Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight squaring her off miraculously against George Clooney.

While Lopez had her turn to share participation in guilty pleasures with Anaconda and The Cell, whatever she was thinking by agreeing to star in this mess dreamed up by writer Kate Angelo whose only credits are in television, you can’t help but wish her luck. On second thought, this film is so bad I take that back.

All you need to know about what this film considers plot is that Zoe (Lopez) owns a pet store, Stan (Alex O’Loughlin, who sounds exactly like Matt Dillon) makes cheese from goats’ milk and they meet-cute immediately following Zoe’s artificial insemination. Everything that happens from that moment on is so by the numbers you wonder how anyone could have possibly been given an actual writing credit.

The opening credit sequence is completely animated featuring a generic white female character becoming increasingly baby hungry as she walks along the streets of Manhattan. The animated white female character makes you wonder just how late into production Lopez was cast as Zoe. While out to dinner with her only male coworker Clive (Eric Christian Olsen) she asks him to be her baby daddy, resulting in the scene demanding a spit take. After Zoe is inseminated, she walks out of her doctor’s (Robert Klein) office with her legs cramped together. During her battle of wits over the stolen taxi issue with Stan she uses the term “stupid head.” After sitting through this movie, if you laughed, you might as well call yourself one too.

Zoe feels lonely so she joins a single mothers support group. The screenwriter is apparently under the impression that only lesbian couples are allowed to be "single" mothers. This is the same support group where we get to see a three-year-old breast feeding. How do we know the child in question is three years old? It turns to the camera and tells us.

Article Author: Cinenerd

A Utah based writer, born and raised in Salt Lake City, UT for better and worse. Cinenerd has had an obsession with film his entire life, finally able to write about them since 2009, and the only thing he loves more are his wife and their two wiener dogs (Beatrix Kiddo and Pixar Animation). …

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