The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.

Isn't an embarrassment. Rather, it's an acceptably executed, thoroughly routine time-killer.

Homies can make good hubbies, goes the moral of this January dump job, a tired send-up of hip-hop-isms that also aspires to be a Waiting to Exhale for men.

There's no story to speak of - three cohabiting bachelors are dragged into adulthood by the simultaneous pregnancies of their girlfriends - but Anderson, Imperioli and Eddie Griffin are amiable company and there's an earned laugh here and there.

Having established its premise and set in motion an overloaded plot, the picture lurches this way and that, evoking more restlessness than laughter and more boredom than pathos.