Movie Review: Can How-to Pregnancy Guide What to Expect When ...

What to Expect When You?re Expecting begins with what I assumed was a spoof of the confoundingly popular TV show Dancing With the Stars. Cameron Diaz plays Jules Baxter, a fitness guru who is a contestant on the show and is herself the host of a televised weight-loss contest that looks like NBC?s The Biggest Loser.

But these two shows within the movie aren?t actually parodies. They?re more like straightforward re-creations. What to Expect isn?t made for audiences looking to laugh at the idiocy of execrable reality television. It?s made for those who watch such programs and enjoy them without irony, who will feel comforted seeing something ?relatable? on the big screen. It?s cinematic baby food, full of inoffensive flavors engineered to soothe the senses with ?insights? on parenthood and the trials of pregnancy that you?ve seen many times before.

The movie is ?inspired by? a best-selling non-fiction guide to pregnancy, though the inspiration is limited to the title and the fact that the story is about five loosely interconnected couples as they plan for the arrival of their own bundles of joy.

First we meet Jules (Diaz) and her celebrity-dancing partner Evan (Matthew Morrison). Their show-mance results in an unintended pregnancy, and Jules? ultra-controlling Type-A personality leads to conflict between them as they discuss such matters as whether their future little boy should be circumcised.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Wendy (Elizabeth Banks) and her husband Gary (Ben Falcone) finally conceive after two years of attempts. Wendy owns a shop for baby clothes and accessories where she promotes the virtues of natural childbirth and breast-feeding, despite never having been through the process herself. When they share the good news with Gary?s wealthy race-car-driving father Ramsey (Dennis Quaid), they learn that dad has knocked up his own much-younger wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker) without even trying.

Also confronting the imminent demands of parenthood are Holly (Jennifer Lopez) and Alex (Rodrigo Santoro), who are adopting a child from Ethiopia, and Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford), a not-quite couple dealing with the consequences of a one-night stand.

The screenplay, seemingly obligated to mine as much as it can from its source material, crams in several possible outcomes and iterations of pregnancy. Some of the women have it easier than others, and there is one gratingly manipulative sequence (all sad-bastard music accompanying slow-motion images) in which one couple suffers a painful loss.

It?s all a bit too much ? too many characters and not enough time spent with any of them to care what happens. Partway through, the screenwriters must have discovered that they?d forgotten to get in many laughs. Comedian Chris Rock is brought in to pinch hit as the head of a ?Dudes Group? of put-upon fathers who cruise around the park together pushing strollers and scaring the bejesus out of the already reluctant Alex when they talk about what parenthood has done to their lives.

Rock and his fellow dudes have the movie?s funniest lines. Everybody else is acting in some separate, far blander comedy.

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