Philip French 

What to Expect When You’re Expecting – review

This procreation comedy offers endless diaper and breastfeeding jokes but not much else, writes Philip French
  
  

what to expect
Chris Rock and Thomas Lennon play dads-in-the-park in What to Expect When You're Expecting. Photograph: Melissa Moseley/AP Photograph: Melissa Moseley/AP

This terrible comedy is a return to the cycle of late 1980s obscoms, movies packed with obstetric detail celebrating the wonders of parenthood. Back then the women were mostly teenagers. Now they're in their 30s, their biological clocks are loudly ticking and some have joined the IVF league. The movie centres on five couples in Atlanta, along with four males who spend their time wheeling prams together in the park, and no one talks of anything but (as the philoprogenitive Tony Blair might have put it) procreation, procreation, procreation. Diaper jokes and swollen breasts are milked for all they're worth, sentimentality is scattered as freely as Johnson's Baby Powder, and there's a running gag as funny as a running sore about whether the Cameron Diaz character, a TV star, should submit to the demands of her half-Jewish partner on the show "Celebrity Dance Factor" and have their future child circumcised.

 

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