What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012)
Directed by Kirk Jones
Challenges of impending parenthood turn the lives of five couples upside down. Two celebrities are unprepared for the surprise demands of pregnancy; hormones wreak havoc on a baby-crazy author, while her husband tries not to be outdone by his father, who's expecting twins with his young trophy wife; a photographer's husband isn't sure about his wife's adoption plans; a one-time hook-up results in a surprise pregnancy for rival food-truck owners.
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What critics compared What to Expect When You're Expecting to
Based on Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel’s notably plot-free pregnancy manual of the same name, WTEWYE follows the template of all the other ensemble rom-coms released in Love Actually ‘s wake (and what a consistently disappointing output it has wrought): a bunch of tangentially related characters, played by stars you like, pair up in various pleasing combinations.
The film's title is also the name of a best-selling book, which has become something of a bible for first-time mothers, and while it's credited as forming the basis of the film, it feels more like an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed Love Actually.
It may seem a cynical take on the subject, but every subsequent dip into the “Love Actually” well over the past decade has only seen decreasing charms in return, save perhaps for last month’s surprisingly sharp “Think Like a Man.”
Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)”—the film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed Love Actually , an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.
It’s not a bad idea, it’s just been done to death and in most of those cases the resulting films have been less than stellar (Love Actually is one of the few exceptions to that rule).
"Love Actually" and "Crazy, Stupid, Love." are good examples where the end result succeeds despite those aforementioned structural issues.
Though ostensibly adapted from Brooks’ immensely popular novel, the Brad Pitt-helmed World War Z is as much a faithful adaptation of the book as 2012’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was of the ubiquitous baby-brewing tour guide with which it shared a title.
Chris Rock (2012's " What to Expect When You're Expecting ") and David Spade (2011's " Jack and Jill ") are happily along for the ride, though Spade gets a nice moment or two with son Braden and Rock is involved in the film's funniest scene involving a hasty cable visit and his attempt to avoid seeing Deanne's overly critical mother, Mama Ronzoni (Ebony Jo-Ann).