Review for Life As We Know It

Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel) are two people who left a disastrous first date, cannot stand each other, but find themselves as Godparents to their friend's baby Sophie. When Sophie's parents Jacob and Alison (Christina Hendricks and Hayes MacArthur) are both killed in a car accident, Holly and Messer find that they have been named as joint guardians of Sophie.
The film follows the trials and tribulations of these two people who hate each other, forced to live together and look after a baby for the first time. Both have to adjust their lives, work and relationships (with themselves and others) around the needs of Sophie. But the two have to look beyond the conflict between each other and work as a unit in order to do this.
Life As We Know It is an odd beast of a film. I just can't figure out whether I enjoyed it or not. Katherine Heigl is as completely dull and void of personality as she has ever been and Josh Duhamel tries hard to play the comedic role, but it just doesn't work. The rest of the cast seem to consist of one cliché after another, the gorgeous Doctor who Holly is attracted to, the neighbours consisting of the irritating woman and the henpecked husband, the gay couple with the child and the unhappy married couple are all so poorly drawn that you wonder whether they were written or just improvised when they got on set.
Setups for jokes are hit and miss with Messer's attempts to put Sophie in a baby carrier the funniest part of the film and the baby puking and pooping on people, not so much. The problem deep down is that the tone of the film is completely wrong. It is a mix between slapstick fish out of water comedy/ romantic comedy and some drama and the film seems to jump from one tone to the other without realising the effect it will have on the rest of the film. The scenes with the two discovering what had happened to their friends and the ramifications of all that is really sad and then we move on to the characters bickering or blundering up something else with the baby. The film dwells on the financial implications of raising a child, but without giving any real solutions to them. Instead the film seems to just plod along towards the end, rampaging through clichés and obvious scenes until the inevitable and unbelievably predictable ending.
This set comes with a number of extras. Deleted scenes are mostly forgettable and don't add anything to then film, two featurettes that cover how Heigl and Duhamel dealt with the triplets who played Sophie in the film. These both had a few nice moments in them, but you'll probably never watch it more than once. Finally we have an odd Featurette with the actors in character (I think) giving advice on how to raise a child and I'm just not sure what they were going for with this. If it was supposed to be funny, it failed, if it was supposed to be informative it also failed.
Life As We Know It is not a film I would actively seek out. It has its moments (most seen in the trailer), but as a comedy it is a little too dark and as a drama it had a few too many silly moments. If the creators had just chosen which side of the tone they wanted to be on, it may have been better.