Life As We Know It Review

• 1st Apr 2011

Another rom-com starring Katherine Heigl, following on from her previous box-office successes with 27 Dresses and Knocked Up, she is quickly becoming the queen of the genre, picking up the baton held by Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock in the previous two decades. The premise of this film centres around two characters that shouldn’t end up together but inevitably do.

It opens with womaniser Messer (Josh Duhamel) knocking on the door of desperately seeking love Holly (Heigl) for a blind date set up by mutual friends. This winds up being a disaster before they even start with Messer arriving late, having not even booked a restaurant and inviting her to be taken to the dinner date on the back of his motorbike. What were their friends thinking? Of this they are both in agreement. Cut to a montage in the opening credits sequence to show the usual rom-com trick of the passage of time as we see Holly and Messer’s mutual friends getting married and having a baby. Soon this light hearted comedy turns dark when Holly learns that her friends have been killed in a car crash leaving the baby an orphan. It transpires that Holly and Messer are named as the guardians of baby Sophie and are forced to move in to bring the kid up together. I don’t think it would be giving too much away to reveal that Holly and Messer end up falling in love following many trials and tribulations.

Yet, in spite of this unlikelihood, it is the way the authorities handle their relationship that is less believable as they seem to encourage this unlikely non-couple to bring the child up. The characters are fairly well outlined, but the script and the direction is lazy and director, Greg Berlanti, consistently and heavily relies on musical montage sequences to move the plot forward. The best characters in the film are their neighbours, the overweight DeeDee and her beaten down husband, Scott who enjoy some of the best lines. Where it also works fairly well is swaying from light romantic comedy to drama while avoiding the temptation to go gross out like Knocked Up. It also lacks the sentimentality so prevalent in other baby rom-coms, making this film box office gold.

Chris Hick