Life As We Know It review

Life As We Know It (12A, 114 mins)
Director: Greg Berlanti
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

We’re on the rom-com trail once again, this time with Josh Duhamel and Katherine Heigl as our would-be romantic pairing whom we initially meet when they're set up on a disastrous blind date by mutual friends. This was some years earlier and they now treat each other as good natured antagonists who suddenly find themselves thrown together by a slightly tasteless twist of fate that sees their friends die and them named as joint guardians of their one year old baby. This means moving into their friends’ house, where they must contend with the usual nappy and feeding escapades that represent the movie at its most painful. It’s otherwise made palatable by more or less believable and likeable characters, with Duhamel as a sort of low rent Timothy Olyphant offering better value than he did in the atrocious When In Rome from earlier this year, while Heigl has been nowhere near this appealing since Knocked Up. But it can swing from tragic to kooky in the space of a scene, there’s never any doubt where it’s heading and it takes an awfully long time to get there.