PG-13, 1 hr. 52 min. Directed by: Greg Berlanti. Release Date: October 8, 2010. DVD Release Date: February 8, 2011.
I don't think this counts as a spoiler: you know how this is going to work. You know how it's going to end. You've seen this movie before, shot a hundred different ways, with a variety of actors and actresses. Only the details and circumstances change. The results? Not so much. Katherine Heigl, the female lead of this show, actually made a movie that's nearly identical in formula only a few years back: a young woman, whose wound way too tight, meets a man that she's totally not suited for. She's forced to interact with this man due to some random plot device, and what a surprise, opposites attract. No, it isn't the story of The Ugly Truth, or even Knocked Up. This is Life As We Know It, a movie that begins in tragedy, but ends up with everyone having a smile on their face.
More than any other actor on the big screen, Katherine Heigl seems to appear as the same part in different movies. It's a part she plays well, but even Sandra Bullock changes things up once in awhile. I'd like to see Heigl take some direction from her own early career, where she appeared in a wide variety of movies and played a wider variety of roles. She's enjoyable here, and I thought her pairing with Josh Duhamel was better than decent. The two had, I thought, good chemistry, but what progresses in the movie was inevitable. I knew that before Duhamel even knocked on their door for a disastrous first date.
I have to give it to the filmmakers, this is a bit of an emotional roller coaster. The story line involving Sophie, the baby with which Heigl and Duhamel find themselves charged, is a sad one, but it's also one that any parent, or anyone who's ever babysat for a parent can empathize with. I'm a single guy with no kids, and I've been around a baby that won't stop crying... usually on airplanes, but even in my personal life. The journey these two take in the process of accepting their new roles as parents is awkward, emotional, and a little sweet.
So this movie isn't terrible, just terribly predictable. However, it's more than a little funny, and more than most of the time. The characters have some depth (in particular, I love Sophie's social worker, who never fails to appear when things are going, not wrong, but when things are a little topsy turvy, and who always has sage and frank advice) and the situation is strange, but I could see it happen. I enjoyed the movie, but I don't know that I'd feel the need to see it again.
