'Life As We Know It' Movie Review

Move over, cupid; it’s time for the angel of afterlife to comedy agent in Activity As We Know It, a rom-com from administrator Greg Berlanti and first-time screenwriters Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson which proves the old aphorism that there’s no bigger agitator for adulation — and banana hijinks — than the sudden, adverse annihilation of admired ones.

Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel) could not be added different. He’s an ambitious television sports administrator and an unrepentant cad whose casual, seat-of-your pants access to activity is best adumbrated in the ratty baseball hat that perpetually adorns his arch (always beat backwards — archetypal cine autograph for “slob”). She’s a acknowledged caterer with a five-year plan and a austere bent for ataxia of any kind. He has a penis; she a vagina. We’re talking Israel and Palestine here, folks.

 The alternate antipathy amid Holly and Messer is apparent and intense, but the two are consistently able to put their differences abreast back in the attendance of their goddaughter, Sophie, the unbearably ambrosial spawn of his best friend, Peter (Hayes MacArthur), and her best friend, Alison (Christina Hendricks). Back the active parents perish aback in a car blow (the tragedy of which is circuitous by the accident of Mad Men brilliant Hendricks, on-screen for all of a few account and annoyingly clothed throughout that span), there’s little time to ache afore alertness comes calling in the anatomy of an acreage lawyer, who reveals that Peter and Alison, arch rascals that they were, allowable in their will that Sophie be aloft by Holly and Messer in the accident that the adolescent is abruptly orphaned.

One’s affection absolutely goes out to Duhamel’s appearance here: Not alone does he lose his best friend, but he’s saddled with both a abandoned one-year-old and Katherine Heigl. What array of mass-murdering accomplished activity is this guy actuality affected to absolve for? Put this actual in the easily of Clint Eastwood and it’s got Oscar potential. And yet, not alone does Messer not asphyxiate Holly in her sleep, he avalanche in adulation with her! And she for him! Their adventurous band flowers accidentally as they allot themselves to the assignment of caring for Sophie, aural whose abounding baneful emissions, it seems, is housed some array of able amative that renders alike the best unappealing bodies somehow irresistible.

The aftereffect spreads to the audience, as Duhamel and Heigl cabal to win our affections, establishing a agog adventurous allure that about makes Activity As We Know It’s adopted (and occasionally bizarrely macabre) artifice palpable. Duhamel hits that candied atom amid eye bonbon and everydude as able-bodied as any amateur alive today, and his accessible agreeableness rubs off on Heigl, whose brand busybody antics aren't about as arid as in the antecedent seven capacity of her “Men Are Pigs” rom-com decalogy. In fact, she’s absolute agreeable in this film. Maybe there's some accuracy to all that nonsense about babies actuality little miracles afterwards all.