When a one night stand with her awkward neighbor leaves her pregnant, a young woman decides to quickly sleep with a successful businessman and tell him he’s the father of her unborn baby.
Chuck says:
Having the audience empathize with the characters in a film is one of the basic tenants of making a successful movie. If you can’t relate to or sympathize with the people within the story, you risk alienating your audience. Such is the case with Brandon Tamburri’s “Plan B,” a would-be rom com that makes the fatal mistake of focusing on a truly deplorable person while relegating a more sympathetic one to the background.
Abrasive, cynical, and suspicious, Piper (Jamie Lee) is a woman who constantly has her guard up. Ironically, she also has an Instagram account that focuses on relationships, something she’s able to parlay into a book deal and maybe much, much more if it gains any traction. It seems, things are finally going her way. That is, until she finds out she’s pregnant. Two weeks prior, in a drunken stupor, she fell into bed with her neighbor Evan (Jon Heder). One thing led to another and… well, you know the rest.
Now a normal person would tell the father-to-be what has occurred, and a conversation would take place as to how they should proceed with this blessed event. However, Piper, self-centered and vain as she is, goes a different route. Not wanting anything to do with the kind-hearted Evan, she sets out to land a more perfect mate, jump into the sack with him on the first date and then claim the baby is his, thus ensuring she and her after-thought of a child are well provided for.
The script by Jean Monpere and Tamburri takes an unexpected turn when a great deal of time is given to the burgeoning relationship between Piper and poor, unsuspecting investment banker Cameron (Michael Lombardi), who turns out to be a relatively nice guy. As they get to know each other, and she meets his well-off parents, Piper realizes things have worked out far better than she planned.
To Lee’s credit, she embraces Piper’s loathsome side and runs with it, scheming with abandon, having tantrums with zeal. If the plan was to make us absolutely hate this character, she succeeds. Lombardi is quite good as well, slowly revealing a more sensitive side beneath his seemingly vacuous facade.
As for Evan, for much of the film he’s treated as an afterthought and then finally, a convenient avenue to a simple resolution. That’s a shame as Heder is quite capable of bringing a variety of shadings to the character, given the opportunity.
In the end, the film fails to earn its happy ending, as an inexplicable change in Piper’s character facilitates it. Her sudden change in behavior feels more like the act of a desperate writer instead of a logical sequence of events. As a result, “Plan B” leaves a bad taste as abhorrent behavior is rewarded while those with good intentions are taken advantage of.
2 Stars
