The Back-Up Plan

Excruciating, interminable, and preoccupied with the words "shit" and "vagina," "The Back-Up Plan" is the worst film to come out of Hollywood so far this year. Television director Alan Poul ("Big Love") makes his feature film debut with a remedial script by TV writer Kate Angelo that's made even worse by Alex O'Loughlin's cringe-inducing performance as Stan, the uber generic washboard-ab object of Jennifer Lopez's estrogen-peaking character Zoe. The good news is that the movie has the potential to help with the world's population crisis because its treatment of childbirth and parenting is so toxic that no one in their right mind would want to procreate after seeing it. On the day of her artificial insemination, Zoe finally meets the lame duck man of her less than humble dreams. Stan is a cheese maker--no really--who's failing his night school economics classes when he isn't experimenting with goat milk on his New York farm. Zoe goes to meetings with an artificial-insemination support group that consists the most obnoxious bunch of women you'd ever want to meet. Sometimes Zoe hangs out with her "nanna" because the screenwriter was thinking like a five-year-old when she wrote this script. "Hate" is not a strong enough word to describe how I feel about this abysmal insult to cinema.

Rated PG-13. 104 mins. (F) (Zero Stars)