Review: Friends With Kids (2012) sacrifices unconventional family drama for conventional romantic comedy cliches.

Friends With Kids
2012
110 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

There are few things more dispiriting than an engaging and thoughtful film slowly ditching that which made it unique and instead traveling down the road of convention.  Yet such is the case for writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends With Kids.  What starts as a strong and painfully honest look at how adult relationships are affected when said adults start having children gives way to a somewhat conventional romantic comedy set-up where two leads spend the movie looking for love everywhere but with each other.  That the film still maintains its entertainment value is due to is strong cast and slice-of-life details.  But while the film is mostly engaging and occasionally thoughtful, it loses points for ditching the very components that made it stand out among the pack in order to trade on genre conventions.    

Edward Burns and (especially) Megan Fox need to fire their publicists. Friends With Kids gets a poster, with only six of the eight billed stars.

There are six top-billed actors in this film, and six of them appear on the poster.  The two missing actors are, of course, Megan Fox and Edward Burns.  Should we take any particular meaning to Fox's exclusion from the poster?  Burns hasn't been a 'name' since the mid-1990s, but Fox, come what may, remains a publicity machine.  I could speculate on whether or not Lionsgate is afraid that Fox's presence will scare off the older moviegoers that this film is surely targeting, but it would be just that - speculation.  Anyway, the film drops on March 9th, so we'll see.

Scott Mendelson