What To Expect When You're Expecting

Another one of those starry ensemble rom-coms which links multiple couples and their stories together, (think Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve) What To Expect When You’re Expecting is, well, pretty much what you’re expecting.

Five couples in Atlanta are all expecting a baby. There’s a TV fitness instructor (Cameron Diaz) and her celebrity dance partner (Matthew Morrison); a photographer (Jennifer Lopez) and her unsure husband (Rodrigo Santoro); a married couple (Ben Falcone, Elizabeth Banks) who’ve been trying for a while; a former racing driver (Dennis Quaid) and his much younger wife (Brooklyn Decker); and a young couple (Anna Kendrick, Chace Crawford) who had a one-night stand.

Clichéd, predictable and hugely sexist, Kirk Jones’ adaptation of the best-selling self-help pregnancy book is the sort of unfunny, surface-level chick-flick which gives chick-flicks a bad name. Of course, they can be charming and amusing when done right, but this corny jaunt doesn’t offer any genuine laughs and won’t appeal to anyone besides those whose soul purpose in life is to have a baby.

Admittedly, these women are slaves to their raging, overloaded hormones, but the majority of characters here simply aren’t very likeable at all (hello Diaz’s control freak). At times, the daddy group who meet up in the park with their kids come close to tickling the funny bone, but even they feel like warmed-up leftovers from a better comedy we’ve seen before.