Back-up-plan-raptor-jlo

At least once a week, I like to recreate the plot of a sh*tty movie using expository quotes from film critics who were forced to sit though it. I suspect it may help us learn from these films we’ll never see.  This week, it looks like the sh*ttiest movie opening is The Back-Up Plan, starring Jennifer Lopez.  Here, I let the critics provide the Cliff’s Notes, as a teaser for when you might have to watch it on a plane in a few months.

Jennifer Lopez plays Zoe, a New York pet-shop owner who can’t find the right guy but decides to go ahead with her backup plan and have a baby anyway, courtesy of an anonymous sperm donor. (EW)

The first time we see her, she’s at the doctor’s office with her feet in the stirrups being artificially inseminated, wearing false eyelashes and perfect lip gloss. In case we couldn’t possibly imagine what she’s thinking, the script from Kate Angelo (a former sitcom writer) offers this helpful voiceover nugget: “Oh, God, I hope this works. I’ve wanted this for so long.” (AP)

Zoe owns a small pet store and has a wee disabled dog. (NY Times)

“Nuts” is paralyzed from the waist down and pulls himself everywhere on his little cart. (RogerEbert)

She also has a wise grandmother, but with her mother and father gone, Zoe also has abandonment issues. (NY Times)

“This isn’t about a guy,” she declares early in the movie, asserting her pride in choosing single motherhood — but, of course, it’s a movie, so it is about a guy. (WashingtonPost)

Wouldn’t you know it, the moment after she gets pregnant — with twins, no less — she meets the right guy. His name is Stan, and he’s an upstate dairy farmer who sells his delectable goat cheeses at her local farmers’ market. (EW)

Their meet-cute couldn’t possibly be cuter: Both hop into the same New York cab in the pouring rain. (AP)

He takes Zoe to dinner in a paradisiacal garden on Avenue B. (He’s a little bit country, a little bit soft, rock ’n’ roll.) He even drives a tractor without his shirt and talks thoughtfully about sustainable agriculture (really). (NYT)

They argue, they date and, because this needs to be of movie-length, Zoe takes a frustratingly long time to reveal her pregnancy to Stan. (ChicTrib)

The fellow members of Zoe’s single mothers’ group are portrayed as tattooed, fringy freaks hell-bent on home water births and smugly breastfeeding their kids until age 3.  (AP)

Lopez pries a used pregnancy test out of a dog’s mouth, picks pieces of fried chicken out of her hair and has an epiphany in a dumpster. (WashingtonPost)

Director Alan Poul cuts away to Zoe’s Boston terrier for cheap reaction shots so frequently, it could be a drinking game.  (AP)

Nuts follows her everywhere, and whenever he gets a closeup, he barks appropriately, as if he understands what is said. (RogerEbert)

An entire scene involves a pregnant Zoe waxing rueful about her glorious posterior, as she brandishes a photo for evidence. (NY Times)

We’re told in a fly-by expository sentence that Stan’s own insecurities come from his nympho ex-wife. I am not the target audience for “The Back-up Plan’s” money shots, such as shirtless Stan looking all Playgirl Farmer of the Month atop his tractor, and bammo! Zoe is so distracted by the sight, she slams her car into a tree. (ChicagoTrib)

Zoe is a bridesmaid at a wedding, and her water breaks. What does she do? Rush to the hospital? No, she commandeers the wedding’s rented white Bentley and is driven to the market, where the auto shoulders its way right down the middle of the street and halts before the organic goat cheese stall, where Zoe can leap out and make up with Stan right there in public, while onlookers all smile and listen like benevolent insiders, instead of New Yorkers wondering who the hell these jerks are. (Ebert)

Okay, okay, enough with the story.  Can someone wrap this up for us, please?

“The Back-up Plan” doesn’t deserve comparison with sitcoms. It plays like an unendurable TV commercial about beautiful people with great lifestyles and not a thought in their empty little heads. So timid is this film that when it finally arrives at its inevitable childbirth scene, it bails out after two “pushes”!

I am at a loss to explain why the movie squandered an opportunity to show Lopez milking a goat. Or having a goat eat her shoes, or whatever goats usually do in movies of this sort.  (Ebert)

Perfect.

[Sources: EW, AP, WaP, NYTimes, ChicagoTrib, Ebert]