Movie Review

THE BACK-UP PLAN

After dealing with two years of J.lo withdraw,many of us were excited if not ecstatic to see her comeback to star in what would be the most appropriate film of her career,considering she is now a full time mom and wife to singer Marc Anthony. Her new film The Back-Up Plan takes place in New York City were Zoe (Lopez) decides to be artificially inseminated due to her failed attempts of finding Mr. Right. With no time to waste; Zoe decides to take matters into her own hands to start the family she has always wanted. However, like life, it's always full of surprises. One being Stan ( Alex O'Loughlin) who she soon meets to find he is exactly what she is looking for. Now Zoe must find a way to juggle both the man of her dreams and the expected yet unexpected surprise of a baby.

Review:
Honestly, I have always found a strong interest for all of Jennifer Lopez's movies regardless of film ratings only for the fact that I am a die hard J.lo fanatic. And from observing the TV spots and movie trailers,I expected to see the directorial format to be more from the work of directors such as Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses). But after seeing it I was a somewhat dissapointed.

But after watching this film,it might put some sense into why this movie is the way it turned out to be. Alan Poul,the director of The Back-Up Plan known for his brilliant work in the HBO series Six Feet Under and Big Love showed that romantic comedies may not be his forte`. Although Jennifer did triumph in Maid in Manhattan which was another romantic comedy first for director Wayne Wang, she didn't quite live up to that luck in this film. While the movie did have a lot of funny moments, it had a few awkward ones as well. Starting at the beginning of what seemed like the longest opening since 1950.

Places that should have background music to emphasis moments were replaced with dead silence and the classic "Montage scene" of the main characters didn't even exist. Nevertheless, like any movie it had its bad points and it had its good points. Luckily this movie did show off the hard work of J.lo's new physique post Alex and Emme, more and more it displayed Lopez's natural talent of making a fool of herself to entertain her audience, and did a wonderful job of showing believable chemistry between her and and her co-star (O'Loughlin). Overall after first viewing I give this movie three and a half stars it wasn't great but it wasn't horrible either.

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