Review No.124: Friends With Kids

Certainly for me there's no denying that Bridesmaids was one of the biggest comedy hits of last year and for most possibly one of the most surprising. Director Paul Feig and writer Kristen Wiig have denied a sequel is being made but in the meantime at least half of the cast are starring in a sort of second instalment in Friends with Kids which stars Wiig alongside Jon Hamm, Chris O'Dowd and Maya Rudolph. It is Hamm's other half Jennier Westfeldt who takes the lead, as well as writing and directing the film, as she plays Julie the only single woman in a group of couples who are played by the aforementioned Bridesmaids ensemble. As her friends start to become parents she wonders if it is their new family life that is making the mean so she and the other singleton in their group, Adam Scott's Jason, decide to make a kid of their own so they can share the custody to maintain their single lives half of the time. Their friends are initially sceptical of the idea however they are envious to see how well the situation works out once Julie gives birth to their son Joe however she soon realises that she's in love with the father of her child which is too bad as he's just stated dated Megan Fox's shapely dancer Mary Jane. Julie herself is set up with handsome single father Kurt, played by Edward Burns, who is charming and in addition is more into kids than Jason's new partner. Jason and Julie's friends are also having trouble as Leslie and Alex, played by O'Dowd and Rudolph, have stopped being intimate while Hamm and Wiig's Ben and Missy have become completely miserable as they constantly snap at one another. This all builds up to a New Year's weekend at a lodge where all eight of them have to co-exist and as you can imagine things don't go all that well.

One thing that Friends with Kids reminded me of was why I enjoyed Bridesmaids so much as the scenes involving all the couples are definitely the film's best. The opening scene in which the six friends all dine together I thought I would find them all smug and annoying however as they became parents they returned to normality. I found Rudolph and O'Dowd the most believable of the couples, although the latter had to struggle with a dodgy American accent, but Hamm and Wiig had some serious chemistry going on. The problem is that those four are presented as the supporting player while it is Scott and Westfeldt who have to anchor most of the film and while she does everything she can to help her film survive personally I found him unlikeable throughout the first half of the film until he started dating Megan Fox but then if you started sleeping with Megan Fox you'd have no reason to be an ass. In terms of her script Westfeldt does demonstrate how friends can sometimes be nasty to one another however at times I felt she went overboard with the swearing as well as in how open Julie and Jason were about the intimate areas of their new partners. I felt the film peaked during the dinner scene in Vermont and from then on it lost all sort of credibility as it went down the sentimental route on the way to a traditional romantic comedy denouement. Another problem for me was not discovering the fates of the other, and in some respects more interesting, couples who's ups and downs I'd followed for the best part of two hours. Everything looks stylish and slick throughout while the entire cast bounce well off one another however the ending just felt forced as if Westfeldt had to make a traditional ending to her film in order to get a wide release. To me the message of Friends with Kids seems to be that having children makes you less smug or less of a jerk however it usually wrecks solid relationships, so in essence don't have kids unless you're prepared to entirely change your personality.

Verdict: A stylishly made urban comedy with a great supporting cast which is hampered by occasionally annoying leads and a predictable final third so for that reason it gets a 6/10