‘Nine Months’ May Do Better Due To Grant’s Sexcapades

The new Hugh Grant movie “Nine Months” opened nationally Wednesday. Since then, movie critics have been registering their opinions. Here is a cross-section of their views of “Nine Months:”

Bob Fenster/The Arizona Republic: … a video of Grant trying to explain his indiscretion to his girlfriend would have been more interesting.

Frank Bruni/Detroit Free Press: Hugh Grant’s recent sexcapade may be the best thing that could have happened to “Nine Months.” It lends a modest air of intrigue, risk and friskiness to a movie that earns none of those attributes on its own.

Rene Rodriguez/Miami Herald: “Nine Months,” a lightweight comedy about impending fatherhood, won’t be remembered for much other than being the film that proved Hugh Grant’s career didn’t evaporate after he was caught with his pants down.

Soren Andersen/McClatchy News Service: Spare me the stunningly violent slapstick found in “Nine Months.” Spare me the picture’s cloying sentimentality. Spare me, above all, its insufferable smugness as it trumpets the character-building properties of expectant parenthood. It’s enough to give the whole complicated business of love, marriage and gestation a bad name.

Robert W. Butler/Kansas City Star: For mainstream audiences to whom Grant is relatively unknown, “Nine Months” may prove a moderately diverting entertainment. But he’s not so overpowering a presence that he can keep aloft a project as lacking in inspiration as this one.

Janet Maslin/New York Times: … this is an occasion for Grant to prove his professional mettle, and he does that smashingly, even in a film so broad that its bold strokes could be seen from Alpha Centauri.

Bottom line: “Nine Months” is slick, phony and uneven, but it’s often raucously funny too. And Grant displays enough intelligence and sportsmanship to emerge from this ordeal as a major Hollywood star.

Bob Strauss/Los Angeles Daily News: If any movie could ever use a curiosity factor, it’s “Nine Months.”

The producers of this amiable, forgettable confection owe Hugh Grant a debt of gratitude for getting himself busted last month.

Michael Janusonis/Providence JournalBulletin: Many of the film’s best lines are unintentional, as the audience finds hindsight meanings in many of Grant’s lines. Who won’t laugh when he talks about being “sexually frustrated” or when a woman he’s dropping off asks him, “Do you wanna come up for sex?”

William Arnold/Seattle Post-Intelligencer: The film is not a total disaster, and often is even enjoyable in a shoddy way, but it’s also not much of a vehicle for the fast-rising Grant, and - even more than his arrest for lewd conduct in Los Angeles - tends to erase all the good feeling he has engendered.

Kenneth Turan/Los Angeles Times: Recent events notwithstanding, the biggest threat to Hugh Grant’s career is not the occasional vice arrest but the indifferent performance of forgettable material. Films like “Nine Months” can kill a career faster than the tabloids.

Jay Carr/The Boston Globe: Although Hugh Grant may have saved his best performance for Jay Leno and the “Tonight” show, he’s not bad in “Nine Months,” either. With a delicious irony Hollywood couldn’t have scripted but doesn’t mind capitalizing on, Grant’s first movie following his run as scandal sheet flavorof-the-month is relentlessly family valuesoriented. More to the point, it’s a slick, frantic crowd pleaser casting Grant as Mr. Reluctant - a guy who refuses to grow up.