I really wanted to like this one more than I ultimately did. Not just because it's an Australian film, it's an interesting story just one that didn't quite gel for me.
Jonah (Ryan Kwanten) is your average single twentysomething living in Sydney. He parties, hooks up and basically has no responsibility.
It's during one of his random hook ups that he discovers a lump on a testicle. It turns out he has cancer and must have the offending piece of anatomy removed. He'll be fine but the catch is that he won't be able to conceive a child. So Jonah sets out to find someone who wants to have a baby with him.
Jonah's housemates Stevie (Sarah Snook) and Gus (Ryan Corr) realise this is a bad idea but are seemingly powerless to stop him trying to convince ex-girlfriends and other random women he knows to carry his baby.
Stevie, who professes to never want children, eventually tries to set Jonah up with a lesbian couple and another friend from work who might be interested but to no avail. She then decides she'll make an arrangement and the burning sexual tension between the two finally gets the better of them, unbeknownst to Gus.
The cast is great. Ryan Kwanten plays the lovable Jonah brilliantly, in some ways he's not unlike the Griff character from his film Griff The Invisible a couple of years ago. Kind of vulnerable as well as confident.
Sarah Snook grows on you, perhaps it's her character that is a little slow to develop. Ryan Corr, who we know from Packed To The Rafters, is the ultimate sidekick. It's almost like they took Coby from Rafters, made him a little less bumbling, and planted him in the film. He's great and he gets most of the funny lines - including the very last one in the movie which is a riot - and seems oddly obsessed with seeing the cancerous testicle once it has been removed.
So why didn't it quite work? I think it spent too much time trying to decide what type of movie it is. They would have been better served going for a drama with elements of the rom-com rather than the other way around because it took too long to start to work in that way. You're basically inside the last half an hour before that all clicks.
It's an excellent story idea....a guy whose thoughts are so far from parenthood and settling down suddenly finds being a father his top priority, just as he's given up he finds love.
I wouldn't discourage anyone from giving this a go, you might get more out of it than I did or it might resonate more. A 7 out of 10, which is still good, but I was hoping for an 8 or more.
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