Is it that Katherine Heigl has a really narrow range or just really likes romantic comedies? In any case, the Grey’s Anatomy star apparently isn’t worried about typecasting. Since the smart Knocked Up, she’s done the fluffier 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth, Killers, and now this pairing with Josh Duhamel. She sticks to her smart-bordering-on-stiff persona, whereas Duhamel does a lot with an even more stereotypical playboy role. Set up by friends, they have an appalling blind date, but two years and one car crash later, these two single Atlantans learn that they’ve been designated the guardians to the suddenly orphaned daughter of their friends.
Some people foolishly have children to save a relationship. Here, a couple forms a relationship to raise a child. Although there’s no romance for much of the movie, it’s still has many of the tropes of the romantic comedy. You just know there’ll be a montage of cute/awkward baby raising scenes, a few pee and poop jokes, and comic-relief supporting characters like the child-services employee who shows up in the movie’s silliest sequences. Commendably, the child care is all very egalitarian. At its most serious, the movie puts us in the position of young people suddenly saddled with a large obligation. At its weakest, the ending trots out the biggest romantic comedy cliché I can think of, but most of the time the movie just settles into a likeable but mediocre groove. Heigl and Duhamel make a nicer couple than Heigl and Seth Rogen, Heigl and Ashton Kutcher, or really anyone and Ashton Kutcher, but there’s nothing else to lift the film above the standard Hollywood romantic comedy as we know it.
IMDB link
viewed 9/30/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/7/10
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