The new film “Life As We Know It” follows the shopworn formula from today’s rom-com assembly line.
Boy hates girl. Girl hates boy. Add wacky plot twist that could never happen in real life. Love blossoms.
Good thing “Life” boasts the genre’s hardest working performer, Katherine Heigl, and an actor who deserves better scripts than he gets, Josh Duhamel.
Together, they overcome tired diaper gags, wan supporting characters and even the hoariest of all the modern rom-com cliches – the mad dash to the airport. The film itself really doesn’t deserve them.
Heigl and Duhamel star as Holly and Messer, a pair of attractive singletons who met on a blind date and can barely stand the sight of one another. But they keep getting together due to their mutual best friends, a sweet couple with an infant daughter named Sophie.
When Sophie’s parents die in an auto accident, we learn they left Sophie in the hands of … Holly and Messer.
Raise your hand if this has happened to you, a family member or even an 18th cousin. Didn’t think so.
Holly and Messer decide to follow their late friends’ wishes, even living in the same house left to them by the couple. But they don’t sleep in the couple’s old bedroom. That would be weird.
The duo’s parenting skills are a bit rough, but while they learn how to care for a young one they also realize they don’t hate each other as much as they once did.
Here’s some free advice to Hollywood – please put a moratorium on jokes involving babies who vomit, produce smelly diapers or otherwise gross us out. It takes a screenwriter all of six seconds to write these tired bits, and it shows.
“Life” rarely transcends its hackneyed story, but it’s easy to spot chemistry bubbling between the stars.
Heigl is a charmer, a beauty in that attainable manner Megan Fox can never replicate. She knows how to dial up sexy when needed, and she’s at ease looking emotionally shaken. Duhamel is freakishly handsome, and it could take CGI to make him look like an ordinary Joe. But give him a ball cap and scruffy shirt and he’s the local dude who scores with all the ladies and can whip your hide in touch football.
What single lady wouldn’t fall for him, even if he carries the usual Samsonite-sized commitment issues?
The gags are mostly weak – the coterie of neighbors provides the humor, and a child protective services agent moves the story along while adding a few fresh insights in the film’s waning moments.
The child-rearing sequences provide some warm, fuzzy moments, like when Messer screams for Holly to come see Sophie’s first steps. The scene culminates in an aggressive bit of comedy that somehow works as planned.
But formula trumps star power too often for the film’s fledgling romance to woo us. Even the presence of Josh Lucas as the other man in Holly’s life can only do so much to lift the material.
“Life As We Know It” is nothing like any situation audiences have ever known, but spending two hours with Heigl and Duhamel is hardly a run of the mill event.
(Photo: Josh Duhamel, as Eric Messer, holding Sophie, and Katherine Heigl as Holly Berenson in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ romantic comedy “Life As We Know It,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Peter Iovino)
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