Controlling caf owner Holly (Heigl) suffers through the worst blind date of her life when her best friend, Alison (Hendricks, stripped of her Mad Men glamour), sets her up with her husband's best friend, caddish sports TV director Eric (Duhamel). Fast-forward three years, and Alison and her spouse are killed in a car crash, leaving their one-year-old daughter, Sophie, an orphan. In a plot contrivance that's far-fetched even for romantic comedies, the two sworn enemies move in together to raise Sophie in her late parents' posh Atlanta home---where, amid a blur of dirty diapers and wacky neighbors, they gingerly learn to compromise.
Surprisingly, Life as We Know It isn't half bad, though it indulges in the food-and-home-decoration porn that's become an unfortunate lady-movie trend. Armed with a supporting cast of professional comedians, director Greg Berlanti achieves a pleasantly loose-limbed pace, and Duhamel seems in on the joke that he's a self-involved pretty boy. But it's a sorry state of affairs when Katherine Heigl is the closest approximation of a screwball-ready actor that contemporary mainstream movies can offer. Brittle, workaholic and bitterly single does not a Kate Hepburn make, and in this latest screen iteration of The Taming of the Heigl, she doesn't stray far enough from her standard rom-com shtick.
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