Back Up Plan (2010)

"I laughed hysterically...  Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle
"As a romantic comedy, The Back-up Plan is friendly...  Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Editor's Note Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) is well aware that her biological clock is ticking, but she just can't find the type of guy she'd want to settle down and start a family with. Eventually, she makes the decision to become a single mother. The very same day that Zoe follows through on her plan, however, she meets Stan (Alex O'Loughlin), a single charmer whom she thinks would make a great father. While at first Zoe struggles to hide her condition from Stan, before long there's no denying the truth and she decides to spill the beans. Much to her surprise, Stan responds enthusiastically, announcing that he's in it for the long haul. Over the course of the next nine months, Zoe and Stan enter into a whirlwind romance, begin drawing up wedding plans, and mapping out the rest of their lives together. But will their burgeoning relationship collapse under the stress of all this weight, or was it simply meant to be that Zoe and Stan would both find each other at such a crucial turning point in each other's lives?

	Jennifer Lopez
	Anthony Anderson
	Eric Christian Olsen
	Linda Lavin
	Alex O'Loughlin
	Michaela Watkins - Co-Star
	Maribeth Monroe - Co-Star
	Adam Rose - Co-Star
	Melissa McCarthy - Co-Star
	Cesar Millan - Co-Star
	Danneel Harriss - Co-Star
	Noureen DeWulf - Co-Star
	Xavier Perez Grobet - Director of Photography
	Kathy Lucas - Set Decorator
	Stephen Trask - Composer
	Kate Angelo - Screenwriter
	Tom Bosley - Co-Star
	Robert Klein - Co-Star
	Alan Poul - Director

Entertainment Weekly
"J. Lo makes an ideal advertisement for the power of single motherhood. She's silky, radiant, beaming with personal mojo." -- Grade: B- 05/07/2010

St. Petersburg Times 7 of 10
There's nothing like a movie baby to rejuvenate a sagging career. Just ask John Travolta, or even Steve Guttenberg...After years of forgettable rom-coms and dramas, Jennifer Lopez isn't taking any chances with The Back-up Plan; she's having twins, which is a pretty cagey first plan, if you think about it...The Bronx bombshell and husband Marc Anthony gave birth to twins two years ago, so J-Lo fans will race to The Back-up Plan to see if art imitates life, right? Except that it isn't art. It's barely a movie. More like a sitcom's season arc played out in 105 minutes...Yet this artificially inhabited baby flick kind of works, most of the time. You simply can't resist those cute dimples, cooing sounds and bright eyes following shiny objects...Yep, that Jennifer Lopez is a charmer...She plays Zoe, a pet shop owner with a lovable handicapped dog on a roll cart, so you know she has a big heart. We meet Zoe when she's being artificially inseminated by a quippy doctor (Robert Klein), in hopes of becoming a single mom. Zoe doesn't need a man but that's what she finds soon after pulling up her drawers...Outside the clinic, she enters a cab at the moment a handsome guy named Stan (Alex O'Loughlin) climbs in the other door. They bicker and split. Later, she sees the guy again, running an organic cheese stand at a farmers market. They banter and flirt...Stan treats Zoe to a candlelit garden dinner of pizza and apparently flammable wine. He shows her his cheese cellar, which gets her hot enough to have sex. Then she tells him she's pregnant and the games of pingpong emotion begin. Stan's ready to go the distance, with second thoughts when the twins diagnosis is revealed...First-time screenwriter Kate Angelo betrays her TV roots with each neatly stacked obstacle to happiness, punctuated with shrilly comedy from Zoe's single mom support group. The scene involving one member's natural childbirth that resembles an exorcism is the most unappealing lunge for laughs I've seen in a while. It's a jarring contrast to the sweet movie The Back-up Plan is in its better moments...Credit for that goes to Lopez, massaging an underwritten role into something fine, and O'Loughlin, who I've never noticed anywhere before but projects promising leading man looks and comic timing. Even stock characters -- Zoe's tirelessly supportive friends and relatives -- get style points for giving jobs to old pros Klein, Linda Lavin (Alice) and "Mr. C" himself, Tom Bosley. Of course, the babies are adorable. - Steve Persall