After having spent years with her personal life plastered over tabloids and gossip rags, you may or may not have noticed that the silver screen has been bereft of an appearance from the Latina beauty since 2006. Well if youve been longing for her to make an amazing comeback from her motherly hiatus you should be suitably underwhelmed by The Back-Up Plan unless youve never seen or heard of a rom-com that is.
J-Lo takes on the role of Zoe, a single woman whos had such a gutful of being unable to find Mr. Right and start a family, that shes opted to visit a clinic and get artificially inseminated. Of course, shes on cloud 9 until surprise, surprise she meets the man of her dreams and has to break the news to him that shes up the duff, and try to maintain the relationship shes been waiting for. Naturally, what follows is an hour and a half of the lead players jumping through hoops and staying well inside the lines, while the infinitely more entertaining minor characters provide the smattering of laughs that the film throws up now and again.
While theres nothing really wrong with any of the performances (Lopez is as likeable as always and OLoughlin shows that he can handle the leading man position pretty well), there are some glaring issues that really cant be overlooked. One is that you have to buy the idea that Lopez would struggle to find a bloke. The other is that its way too formulaic to bother sitting through when youve seen the same tired plotting strung out a million times before. Nevertheless, if you must watch it, then opting for the DVD over the Blu-ray would be a wise choice as the swankier format doesnt exactly dazzle in the high def department either.
While the colours are all stark and the image is nice and clear, theres no fast movement to really show off the transfer. Unfortunately its a similar situation with the audio too all clarity but very little in the way of depth and range. Sadly, theyve hardly gone all out with the extra features either. All you get here is a handful of excruciating deleted scenes, bog standard BD-Live content and the misleadingly named Belly Laughs featurette, whereby all the cast gush over how wonderful J-Lo is, while proving that they wouldnt know a decent gag if it walked into a bar. It makes for a disc that you really shouldnt even dream about paying full whack for.
Overall Verdict: An inoffensive but ultimately hollow and pointless jaunt into all-too-familiar rom-com territory. Wait for it to go dirt cheap if you must.
Special Features:
Belly Laughs: Making The Back-Up Plan Featurette
Deleted Scenes
movieIQ
BD-Live
Reviewer: Jordan Brown