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Actually, a montage of Grant's prison mugs would probably be more entertaining than this synthetic, smarmy comedy about impending parenthood. The English actor plays a well-off San Francisco shrink whose life is turned inside out when his long-time live-in, played by Julianne Moore, announces she's pregnant. The news doesn't exactly hit Grant in his paternal streak, but with a little help from his friends ~ Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum ~ maybe he'll get his act together in time to cut the baby's umbilical cord. Without cutting his own throat or cutting himself off from Moore forever.
The movie is a loose remake of a French comedy, "Neuf Mois," that managed to turn the trials and tribulations of first-time fatherhood into something hilarious,genuine and ultimately touching. Alas, director Chris Columbus's Americanized version manages to be simultaneously crude and treacly ~ *my* favorite combination. The filmmaker has pulled off the cinematic equivalent of turning fine, aged roquefort into Cheez Whiz.
Julianne Moore pretty much disappears from the movie after the first trimester, retreating into a dull cocoon of maternal wisdom and saintliness. Grant gamely tries to tough it out on his own, but ends up wearing a glazed look of imminent disaster ~ a function of his character's predicament or the actor's? You choose. Arnold punches out a Barney-clone in a toy store (the movie's idea of a fresh joke) while Robin Williams does some decades-old Yakov Smirnoff schtick as a Russian gynecologist who gets his English wrong; for instance,he mixes up words like "thesaurus" and "clitoris".
Bottom Line: "Nine Months" is almost as much fun as labor pains.
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