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If you ended up at a dinner party with the six main characters in "Friends With Kids," you would quickly start praying for an attack of food poisoning just to get out of the room.
The film from writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt takes one step further the concept of best friends having uncommitted sex. Best buds Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Westfeldt) plan to have sex only once so they can have a child. They want offspring, but they also want to keep dating. Their plan's to share the child duties equally, an idea that their friends and the audience know from the start just won't work. Both begin to get jealous of the other's new loves and that eventually affects their child-raising agreement.
This film might have worked if Westfeldt didn't present such a hatred of child rearing. One set of friends -- played by the under used Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm -- are one diaper change from launching a full-scale gunbattle. And the other friends -- played by Maya Rudolph and the miscast Chris O'Dowd -- have lost all faith in love and marriage since their children came along. These are very unhappy people.
By the time the friendship between Jason and Julie falls apart, the movie has burrowed so deeply into the mire of marital misfortunes connected to having children that there's no way to rebound for a happy ending. And the ending Westfeldt delivers reduces falling in love to nothing more than the kind of request one would get from a pervert.
The two most likable people in the movie -- the new loves for Jason and Julie played by Megan Fox and Edward Burns -- get unceremoniously dismissed.
