What to Expect When You're Expecting: Critic Reviews

Remember when advice books stayed on the shelves where they belonged?

Director Kirk Jones and screenwriters Shauna Cross and Heather Hach consistently fall back on corny music and slow-motion to try to get laughs. Very little of this movie feels risky, or even frisky.

All-star cast headlines bawdy, inconsistently funny comedy.

None of it's really funny, nothing observed feels fresh, nothing shown hasn't been shown before.

There's a brief, angelic moment near the end, with the mothers aglow, the fathers proud, and the babies gurgling that almost makes one forget that this is a brutally predictable, wildly unfunny film. Almost.

Once the finest hack minds in Hollywood finished fleshing out this project, they took the pregnancy-is-hard message and matched it up to characters with the hubris to believe otherwise. With (un)hilarious results.

The closest they come to a minority is Jennifer Lopez adopting a black baby, which is about as much of a minority experience as getting a taxi easily in New York.

A feeble, floundering mom-com that gives short-shrift to the 'expectant' experience.

It is the birth control of movies. What To Expect When You're Expecting could scare you away from having a baby for life.

What to expect when you're watching What to Expect When You're Expecting? Not much.

One gets the sense that the filmmakers had their list of topics and exchanged high fives after doing, say, a scene involving a C-section birth. Cross that one off.

There's little that feels real or honest in this greatest hits parade of stereotypes about pregnancy and the attempt to disguise it in manipulative sentimentality makes it all the more nauseating.

... on balance, a parade of humdrum banalities ...

Watching 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' is like attending a baby shower where some guests give the mother gifts she didn't want or need.

Elizabeth Banks provides the laughs in this-isn't-the-horrible-baby-jokes-lightweight-ensemble-comedy-you-think-it-is.

I can't watch that many characters simultaneously push without feeling like I, too, have been put through the ringer. If only the filmmakers had themselves pushed harder for a more incisive and more daring depiction of 21st century new parenthood.

The film wants to be a diverse, all-encompassing examination of contemporary parenting, but it's overly sanitized and insists on neatly tying up each of its stories at the end.

Drag a guy to this one and he'll never forgive you.

For all the wisdom it may have to offer, What To Expect would rather resort to immature humour for kicks.

I found some of its multiple storylines annoying and hopelessly contrived, at first; it's only toward the end, when the film draws from real life, that it finds its heart and becomes relatable for anyone who has been through pregnancy or parenthood.

Terrific film for both men and women and any expectant parent needs to go out and see this and prepare for the road of surprises you will have ahead of you over the next nine months!

It is, indeed, what a moviegoer should expect from a genre in which an ensemble cast of famous, pretty faces is loosely strung together by an innocuous holiday or, in this case, baby-having.

Expecting is uneven and at times struggles under its own weight, but overcomes its shortcomings to be worthy of ponying up for a babysitter for the rare parental date-night.

What to Expect is like what they say about childbirth--You'll scarcely remember a thing when it's over, but you won't need that epidural either.