Another romantic comedy as we know it…
The H-Bomb: After a young married couple is killed in a car accident, their best friends, Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel), themselves an ex-item, are shocked to learn that they have been named as the guardians for the couple’s year old daughter, Sophie. Holly is an ambitious small business owner with plans of expanding it. Messer is a carefree, womanizing type who is very content with living the bachelor‘s life. Neither one thinks they have room in their lives to care for and raise a baby.
However, after several unsuccessful attempts to unload Sophie off on the deceased couple’s relatives, Holly and Messer decide to give this whole parenting thing a shot. They move into the couple’s house, while agreeing to sleep in separate rooms, and go through the trials and tribulations of taking care of an infant. Eventually, surprise-surprise, they actually start to enjoy being parents, despite what a pain in the rectum it can be sometimes, and even more surprisingly, they start to develop feelings for each other… wow, I really didn‘t see any of that coming.
I know it‘s difficult to establish a tone in print, but I really hope my sarcasm in the previous sentence is coming through because I am laying it on pretty thick. “Life as We Know It” is yet another assembly line piece of fluff that the Hollywood Rom-Com factory churns out every year by the dozens. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again. Its every move, every turn in the plot, and even many of its jokes, can be seen coming from miles away. But, it’s not the job of a romantic comedy to surprise us. It’s job is to make us like the two blandly attractive leads enough that we want to see them get together in the end and to make us laugh along the way. Does it accomplish these two goals? Well, yes… to some extent.
Watching these two bumble and stumble their way through sudden parenthood is consistently amusing, with a few laugh out loud moments tossed in here and there, like when Messer recruits a cab driver as a babysitter, which brings about disastrous results. Others, like a loaded diaper, spit up carrots, and other typical baby gags, provide some chuckles. Showing how frustrating (and infuriating) being a parent to an infant can be is something this movie does very well. In fact, if there’s something I took away from this, it’s that parenthood is not for me.
Baby raising antics aside, there’s also a group of eccentric neighbors, including a stereotypical fat obnoxious house wife and a stereotypical well-kempt gay couple that add to the enjoyable-if-unremarkable laughs. My favorite from the oddball supporting cast would have to be the stuffy-yet-neurotic social worker who drops in on the new parents from time to time. In a weird way she’s kind of an audience surrogate in that she wants to see this strange new family succeed as much as we do. She even cries when it looks like Holly and Messer may be done for good.
A main problem I had with this flick was the basic premise. Now “The Switch” was pretty tough to swallow, but this even outdoes that. Am I really supposed to believe that the ill-fated married couple would make their best friends the Godparents to their daughter without even bothering to tell them, or more importantly, ASK them? Puh-Lease!!! There are also moments of drama throughout the picture, mainly concerning Messer and his reluctance to take on the responsibility of being a father, that are effective and believable, but they’re ultimately undermined in a way by the film’s sheer predictability and the knowledge that, at the end, everything will be okay.
I know many Internet reviewers despise Katherine Heigl and the many rom-coms she‘s appeared in, but being that I haven’t seen any of her prior films, I have no baggage with her, and therefore, I actually liked her in the film. I thought that she and Duhamel had real chemistry and made a believable couple, especially during the excruciating moments when they‘re both trying to cope with the screaming kid. Who knew you could sooth an infant to sleep with a Radiohead song?
Underrated actor Josh Lucas pops up a few times as the baby’s nice guy pediatrician and “other man” love interest for Heigl. He’s solid enough, but like Patrick Wilson in “The Switch”, Lucas is too good an actor to waste in these “other man” roles. The main source for enjoyment here is, of course, the rugrat herself, Sophie. She spits, and shits, and pisses, and pukes, all for our amusement. And for the most part, it works. She’s adorable.
“Life as We Know It” is the kind of movie you go to if there’s absolutely nothing better playing. It’s easy enough to watch, but overall entirely insignificant, and definitely not worth going out of your way to see.
