Kid stuff

>>Pregnancy-themed Baby Mama
is mildly funny but mostly uninspired

by MARK SLUTSKY

At this point, there’s really no argument to be made against the comedic talent of Tina Fey. Okay, she didn’t completely save Saturday Night Live during her tenure as the show’s first female head writer, but she did a pretty good job of holding it down, and her “Weekend Update” segments were consistently the funniest part of the show. Mean Girls, back in the days when the world was young and Lindsay Lohan was a fresh-faced up-and-comer, and which Fey wrote, was a solid teen comedy.

But Fey’s greatest accomplishment by far has got to be her current TV project, 30 Rock, the brilliant, borderline absurdist NBC sitcom based on her time at SNL. As the show’s creator and star, Fey completely came into her own with 30 Rock, and so my expectations were naturally high for her next movie vehicle, Baby Mama.

Fey doesn’t write here—though I suspect she added some of her own zingers—as the script is by the movie’s director, SNL vet Michael McCullers. She plays a successful executive at a Whole Foods-type company led by flaky CEO Steve Martin, the kind of ambitious female movie character with no time to start a family. When her biological clock starts ticking, though, she decides to have a kid of her own, but her uncooperative uterus leads her to obtain the services of a surrogate (Amy Poehler).

Poehler is a rough-hewn, vaguely white trash character, and when she moves in with Fey, the wacky antics unfold. But this is where the movie makes its first stumble, as Poehler isn’t that outrageous; you feel like her character’s been softened to make her more likeable, and the comedy suffers for it.

There are definitely some laughs in Baby Mama, but the film feels lazy overall, as if someone decided that having talented comedic actors was enough and if they could just do their own thing with an okay script then a serviceable comedy would somehow just ensue. It’s mildly funny but miles away from 30 Rock’s inspired awesomeness, and that can’t help but feel like a letdown. When you’ve seen what the talent behind this movie is capable of, a comedy this generic and uninspired just isn’t enough.

Baby Mama opens this
Friday, April 25

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