Released: 21st March
Seen: 26th April
Amy Schumer is one of those comics who always gets a bad rap and is a common target of some pretty intense online vitriol. If you ever hear some online douchebag proclaim that women aren’t funny, her name will be one of the first ones to come out of their shithole mouths. Now I believe that Amy can be a pretty funny comic performer when she has the right material, her work on the Comedy Central Roasts was universally great, her first film Trainwreck was hilarious, her TV series Inside Amy Schumer had some brilliant sketches that still hold up to this day and I’ll even say she was a good co-host of the Oscars a few years ago. She has her problems as a performer, but she is capable of being very funny… just not in Kinda Pregnant, but that’s because there’s not much about that film in general that would be considered funny.
Kinda Pregnant revolves around Lainy (Amy Schumer), a teacher who has always wanted nothing more than to be a mother but has never been able to accomplish that. When her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) actually ends up becoming pregnant, Lainy has a moment where she gets caught wearing a fake baby bump and is believed to be pregnant, so she ends up running with it. Soon her pretend pregnancy has gotten her to fall in with a new friend, Megan (Brianne Howey), who is also actually pregnant, and the two of them start hanging out more. What follows is about an hour of an elaborate lie catching up to Lainy, and then the rest of the classic “Liar Revealed” plot that happens in so many farcical comedies.
Now to give Kinda Pregnant some kind words, while I wouldn’t say that most of it would be considered funny, I can’t pretend that there aren’t some half-decent comedic moments to be found. This cast is stacked with incredible comics and, if you let them go, they’ll make something happen. You have your occasional moments, Urzila Carlson as a slightly insane guidance counselor will steal any scene she’s in with her utterly foul mouth and there’s a couple of lines that got a half decent chuckle as they went by but for the most part you can see where the joke is (either cos it’s so obvious or they’ve done it so many times before) and it’s just not being sold well so it doesn’t end up landing.
What doesn’t help at all is that the main character is completely unlikable in every possible way. Her main story is one of her willfully choosing to deceive people for no good reason, it’s like Mrs Doubtfire except instead of the understandable reason of “I want to see my kids” behind the deception, Lainy’s reason for the fraud is “Because…” and there’s nothing else there. OK so the reason they try to sell the audience on is that she always wanted to be a mom so she fakes a pregnancy. For the record, that’s a dumb excuse and makes it impossible to like her and thus removes any comedic tension. I don’t worry that she’ll be found out because I want her to be found out. After all, she’s a bad person who deserves it. There’s no comedy there, nothing there to relate to, because it’s such a selfish and horrible act. There’s a reason why when Glee did a similar plot line in its first season, they did it to a character we were meant to dislike; this is one of those lies you can’t just sweep away as a cute quirk.
Even if you could pretend this was just a quirky thing, you have to have decent jokes to surround it, and that’s another place Kinda Pregnant just fails. Either the jokes are not that funny or get done so often that even if they were funny the first time, they stop being funny the eighth time. I lost count of how many times the big joke was “Lainy did something that could’ve caused an instant abortion if she was really pregnant, but she’s not so it’s fine but look at how horrified everyone around her looks”, and it’s just not funny. There’s no moment when they push it to the point of comic absurdity (and they have the opportunity so many times to push it so far it becomes a shock laugh, at least that’d be a laugh). It just gets tiring.
Speaking of tiring, the characterisations and plot just do not work. There’s minimal consistency in how the characters behave, the plot is threadbare and at times feels like it just forgets entire major characters exist and the emotional ending is completely unearned. No one grows, no one learns, no one is made better by the events of Kinda Pregnant, shit just happens and we’re all gonna have to move on. Hell, I say that there’s no consistency in the characters but that’s because it doesn’t feel like these are characters, Amy Schumer is just playing Amy Schumer with a slightly different name, Urzila is just playing a slightly exaggerated form of her stage act. The only person in the cast who feels like they’re trying to play a character is Will Forte and, surprise, he’s the one who might have the closest thing to a character arc. I’m not expecting this to give Oscar level performances, it’s a Netflix Rom-Com that was dumped out at the start of the year so I should be thankful the entire cast turned up to shoot the damn film but none of them feel like they’re even trying.
It would be unfair to say that Kinda Pregnant is absolutely fucking awful with no redeeming features, but mostly because it’s so average and forgettable that being that hyperbolic would be me putting more effort into this review than the filmmakers put into the film. It’s not like Kinda Pregnant has a completely awful idea, there’s something to be done with the idea of someone pretending to be pregnant who learns about the actual difficulties of being pregnant (indeed, last minute praise for the film for not just glorifying childbirth as some magical perfect thing but actually pointing out the real medical dangers associated with the act of shoving a small human out of your vagina) but Kinda Pregnant doesn’t really do anything with it and anything it tries to do backfires because it’s full to the brim with unlikable characters who you don’t want to spend the time with. Kinda Pregnant is kinda shit, but not shit enough to be interesting or worth talking about again after this.
Movie Meister Reviews 