Lower Your Expectations

Review: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

In 2009 we admitted He’s Just Not That Into You. 2010 asked us out for Valentine’s Day. In 2011 we celebrated New Year’s Eve. And now, in 2012, we learn What To Expect When You’re Expecting. We can learn a lot by studying this list:

1. Hollywood places more emphasis on cast than script. This is obvious, since it is the actors and actresses who get all the attention. How many screenwriters can you name? … Exactly. So studios think that as long as they populate their film with stars, it doesn’t really matter what they are actually doing on screen. Therefore, while more of a story could be told with less characters, many filmmakers would rather sacrifice plot for profit, and profit comes from movie stars.

2. Similar to #1, much of Hollywood places more emphasis on quantity is than quality. Why pay millions for two prime actors or actresses when you can spend the same amount of money for 10 mediocre actors? A celebrity is a celebrity to those who make these films, so the Meryl Streeps of the industry are unjustly equated to the Katherine Heigls. And the Katherine Heigls are much cheaper. So in addition to a weak story, you can also forget about any real depth of character.

3. If something works once, studio executives will green-light the same thing time and time again. These types of ensemble romantic-comedy films could stretch back further than 2009 and could include many other films in between (these four just seem the most similar to me).

4. The quality of each “clone” decreases with every cloning. Think about the “spoof” film resurgence which started with the actually entertaining Scary Movies. Now, countless films later, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and Vampires Suck are seen as some of the worst films ever made. Let’s take a look at an average of scores from RottenTomatoes.com (both critic & audience ratings) and IMDb.com (originally on a 10-point scale):

		RT Critics	RT Audience	IMDb	Average
2009	He’s Just Not That Into You	42	60	64	55.33
2010	Valentine’s Day	18	54	57	43
2011	New Year’s Eve	7	47	53	35.67
2012	What To Expect When You’re Expecting	22	57	52	43.67

From 55 to 43 to 35 to 43. Only He’s Just Not That Into You was liked by at least half of the population. It only goes down from there. Now, admittedly, What To Expect When You’re Expecting did see a bit of an increased score, but I think that can be partially attributed to three things:

(1) Right around the corner from Mother’s Day, the film got to play to sentiments freshly floating around in audiences’ heads about moms, (2) the pregnancy aspect does shake up the formula a bit, and (3) not many people actually saw it – remember it opened in fifth place this weekend with only $10 million – so those who did were likely people who really wanted to see the film (perhaps fans of the book), who would be predisposed to like the film before they even saw it.

I say all this to prove my overall point of analysis: You’ve seen this film before in a somewhat different form and it was likely better that time than now in its pregnant state. There are too many cast members to develop any significant story or character. Even the concept of pregnancy is reduced to stereotypes. It’s as if the filmmakers just watched a bunch of sitcoms and every time something about pregnancy happened they thought, “Hey, we can use that in our movie too!”

The second biggest problem the film has (as if the first wasn’t enough!) is that interspersed throughout the lighthearted moments are darker, life-and-death moments that just absolutely don’t fit with the overall atmosphere of the film at all. It’s not a “dramedy” (drama + comedy), it’s a light romantic comedy that sporatically attacks you with doses of grim reality.

It seemed to be an attempt to give the impression that the film actually had some real depth of content, but it is a façade easily seen through. Roger Ebert seems to agree with me, saying “What to Expect is a cheerful comedy with just enough dark moments to create the illusion it’s really about something.”

During those “cheerful” moments I think I only really laughed out loud once. That was during the third act speech by Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games), but even then, the scene wasn’t as funny as it could have been – mostly because it was cut short to give time to all the other characters.

To try to strike a more positive tone here at the end, I will say that Dennis Quaid (The Day After Tomorrow), Chris Rock (Grown Ups), and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) were the best parts of the film. Quaid was clearly having fun, Rock has great delivery, and Kendrick is the closest we come to real character development.

Overall, What To Expect When You’re Expecting isn’t necessarily a horrible film, it just offers absolutely nothing in terms of originality or substance. There's just a limit to what you can do creatively when dealing with five or six different couples.

The Final Word: Don’t even bother.