This Back-Up Plan's More a D Than a B

Jennifer Lopez stars as a perennially single woman who meets Mr Right just after her artificial insemination is a success in The Back-Up Plan, a romantic comedy that spawned more contempt than kudos among critics.

• Mary Pols at Time suffered through 41 weeks of pregnancy and 25 hours of labor, but that was a "walk in the park" compared to Back-Up Plan's "bland and offensive" 100 minutes, she writes.

• Lopez seems more relaxed here than in her earlier romantic roles, writes Shawn Levy at the Oregonian, but the movie suffers from "sludgy pacing, flat writing and acting, and a strange and puzzling fondness for scatology and coarse language."
• There's no surprises here, and "no romance/pregnancy/childbirth cliché unused," writes Cathy Jakicic at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but the movie's sweet enough to be enjoyable "for those with a high sugar tolerance."
• "Jennifer Lopez has never looked better," writes Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times, who believes her talents deserve something better than this "bird-brained plot about characters who have no relationship to life as it is lived by, you know, actual people."

(More Back-Up Plan reviews stories.)