Cameron Diaz (center) stars as a fitness-show host who gets pregnant and bullies her baby daddy in “What To Expect . . .”
The best seller “What To Expect When You’re Expecting” has been around for 28 years, making the book much newer than most of the jokes in this all-star movie.
The film is dully shot and so predictably plotted, you could tick off the items like you’re packing a bag for the delivery room. Mood swings? Check. Waddling? Check. Begging for an epidural? You get the idea.
That said, while it certainly isn’t good, “Expecting” isn’t as charmless as you might have feared, largely due to a cast working furiously to sell every scene.
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The setting is Atlanta, where apparently (who knew?) sex al fresco is all the rage — two couples wind up preggers after encounters in a public park. They are Wendy (Elizabeth Banks) and Gary (Ben Falcone), who’ve been trying to conceive for two years; and food-truck rivals Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford), who hook up on the spur of the moment and definitely aren’t trying.
Elsewhere, fitness-show host Jules (Cameron Diaz) and Evan (Matthew Morrison of “Glee”), her partner in an ersatz “Dancing With the Stars,” also find themselves unintentionally in the family way.
Rounding out the parade of procreation are NASCAR driver Ramsey (Dennis Quaid), Gary’s father, and his trophy wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker), and Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro, as a couple who’ve decided to adopt.
Whatever Lopez has always had, she’s still got it; she’s the only one who gets to show a variety of emotions, and the scene where she and Santoro get their baby is the sole authentically touching moment in the film.
Decker is pretty cute in a very retro dumb blonde role. Banks can be screechy, but her descent into a pregnancy that offers every unpleasant side effect in the book also yields some laughs.
Diaz gets the fewest breaks from the script, as her character bullies her baby daddy over the question of circumcision — you knew the filmmakers couldn’t pass up that topic.
For a movie so squarely aimed at a female audience, it’s odd and quite frustrating that the moms-to-be are such nags, flinging their hormonal emotions all over Atlanta while the men do little but squirm and react. Nobody thought this book was going to morph into “Rosemary’s Baby,” but given that it’s 2012 and not 1984 (when it was first published), it’s depressing that zero chances were taken.
Forget including a single mother or a same-sex couple — “What To Expect” can’t even acknowledge a world where sometimes it’s the man who’s itching for a baby, and the woman who dreads the loss of freedom, sleep and sex drive.
There are some amusing jabs at reality television; Chris Rock shows up as de facto leader of a daddies’ group, and thank goodness he’s still able to make a line sound a lot funnier than it is. On the whole, however, there’s nothing here that’s unexpected.