One thing I will say of What to Expect When You're Expecting is this: most of its comedic moments were very funny. Unfortunately, many of the best gags were revealed in the trailer, and there were plenty of others that fell flat with the audience. As a result, WTEWYE is better off being seen at a matinee or on DVD.
WTEWYE is in the vein of other movies like Valentine's Day or New Year's Eve, where it follows a few couples who are all connected in some way or another. Jules (Cameron Diaz, Bad Teacher) is a celebrity fitness guru who has her own show, and the film opens with her and her dance partner, Evan (Matthew Morrison, TV's Glee) on Celebrity Dance Factor, a TV show similar to Dancing with the Stars. She and Evan win the competition, and receive a big trophy ... which she promptly vomits into. Could she be pregnant, perhaps?
Holly (Jennifer Lopez, The Back-up Plan) and her husband Alex (Rodrigo Santoro, Love Actually) are looking into adopting, and the counselor they meet with says it will be a year or more before they will be able to do so. Suddenly, that date is moved up, and Alex doesn't know if he's ready to be a dad. They make plans to travel to Ethiopia to meet their new son, and so Alex has to get ready for fatherhood sooner than expected.
The other couples include Gary and Wendy (Ben Falcone, Bridesmaids, and Elizabeth Banks, TV's 30 Rock), who had been trying to get pregnant for a long time and finally have accomplished it; unfortunately, Gary's uber-competitive former race-car driver father (Dennis Quaid, Soul Surfer) and his younger-than-him "mom" (Brooklyn Decker, Just Go With It) are also pregnant, with twins. The film also features Anna Kendrick (Breaking Dawn Part 1) and Chace Crawford (TV's Gossip Girl) as a couple that hooked up once, and now Kendrick's character is pregnant, though their circumstances will change later in the movie.
The funniest parts of the film are any scenes Rebel Wilson (Bridesmaids) are in, usually with Elizabeth Banks - Wilson works in Banks' shop, "The Breast Choice," and absolutely stole all of the scenes - and a few of the scenes w/ the dad's group, which includes Chris Rock, Amir Talai, Thomas Lennon, and Rob Huebel. Chris Rock has four kids in the movie, and one of them, the oldest, keeps getting tangled up in things and falling down and/or getting hit by flying objects, which provides a few laughs. Quaid's character encourages Gary (Falcone) to call Decker's character "Mom," which was funny because she is at least ten years younger than he is, and at one point she gets angry at Quaid and says that she will not let her "son" be made fun of. All of the couples in the movie have good chemistry, as well, which probably made the movie better than it should have been.
Maybe see this film. It's definitely a "summer fluff movie," and therefore not worth paying more than matinee price for it. It also goes on longer than it really should (the runtime is 1 hour and 50 minutes), but I enjoyed seeing Chace Crawford on the silver screen - I'm a fan of his on Gossip Girl - and I am betting that the movie does well with the female demographic this weekend because of its A-list cast. I liked it more than other "ensemble"-type movies I've seen recently (case in point: New Year's Eve), but overall there are probably funnier movies in the theater right now that you could choose to see instead.
What to Expect When You're Expecting is in theaters now and is rated PG-13 with a runtime of 110 minutes. 3 stars out of 5.
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Liz Parker is a 2009 graduate of the University of Michigan. She currently works as an Assistant Medical Editor for a pathology website. Visit her at her movie blog Yes/No Films