Don't go expecting much from this pabulum

Expect the worst: Matthew Morrison and Cameron Diaz star in the charmless ensemble rom-com 'What to Expect When You're Expecting.' (Credit: By Melissa Moseley, Lionsgate)

It's Vomit 2, Piddle 3.

What to Expect When You're Expecting presents such pregnancy woes as morning sickness, and frequent urination as a kind of purpose-driven gross-out contest.

What audiences should expect is a tone-deaf, superficial, charmless ensemble rom-com, focused on five attractive, but uninteresting, couples.

Think New Year's Eve with hormone overload. Or Valentine's Day on fertility drugs.

Calling itself "loosely based" on the best-selling pregnancy manual, there's little of any value here. Observations are decidedly shallow: Pregnant women get indigestion and men don't always share women's feelings about having a baby. A satiric look at the nine months of human gestation could have been plenty funny, but bland mockery and tin-eared one-liners don't add up to humor.

Instead, the film recycles clichés and wallows in pregnancy side effects like hemorrhoids, flatulence and cankles.

Those maladies — and more — afflict Wendy (Elizabeth Banks), who owns a retail store called Breast Choice. Though a pregnancy expert, she foolishly expects to glow beatifically through all three trimesters. Her miseries are contrasted with the picture-perfect, bikini-clad pregnancy of her leggy blond stepmother-in-law Skyler (Brooklyn Decker), the trophy wife of blowhard race car driver Ramsey (Dennis Quaid). Inexplicably, Ramsey can't help but compete with his dentist son Gary (Ben Falcone), Wendy's husband. Their rivalry is the source of some of the most inane scenes, especially a golf cart chase that culminates with Gary crashing into his father's pool during his stepmother's over-the-top baby shower.

Cameron Diaz plays TV fitness guru Jules whose romance with Evan (Matthew Morrison), her partner on a celebrity dance show, lands her in the family way. But their busy careers make it hard to be in the same place at the same time. Still, they manage to find time to argue ad nauseam over whether or not to to circumcise their baby.

Holly (Jennifer Lopez) and Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) are a married couple adopting a child. As a baby portrait photographer, Holly is more than ready. But Alex, a music promoter, is less certain. Enter the "Dudes Group."

Alex joins the daddy pack led by Chris Rock for weekly stroller crawls through the park. The dudes are shown walking in slow motion, even drinking from baby bottles. Laughing yet? They delight in sharing their child-rearing battle scars: one found his kid swimming in the toilet, another proclaims his baby ate a cigarette.

A tad less formulaic is the story revolving around rival food truck chefs Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford), whose brief dalliance results in a pregnancy.

Director Kirk Jones intertwines these unconvincing characters' stories in a ham-fisted style. For a movie that purports to show audiences that no matter what plans are made, things don't always go as expected, it's maddeningly predictable — from natural-childbirth advocate Wendy's cries for drugs during delivery, to its ultimate support of traditional family values.

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