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Baby Mama

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Tina Fey consistently surprises me. I first got to know her as the funny chick who sat next to Jimmy Fallon on SNL's Weekend Update; by the time I figured out she was the show's head writer and had warmed up to her, I heard she was writing a movie for Lindsay Lohan. Then the trailer came out, and I was disappointed, because it looked like crap.

But surprisingly, Mean Girls wasn't crap. It was a really well-done comedy that managed to work both as a teen movie and a satire of teen movies. For her next project, she decided to move back to television and write and star in a vaguely autobiographical sitcom about the head writer of a sketch show. Again, it didn't look that great, and the pilot actually wasn't – it was pretty bad, in fact.

But – surprise again! – 30 Rock subsequently turned into the funniest show on network TV.

I was determined not to be surprised by Baby Mama. But doubts still held sway. Fey and Amy Poehler are both really funny by themselves, but when they were paired together on Weekend Update it always seemed like they were phoning it in. And the title? Kind of lame. One thing was for sure: I would either love it or hate it.

Surprise! Baby Mama is neither an outright success nor a terrible movie – it's just a bland, occasionally chuckle-inducing comedy that feels like it came straight out of the assembly line.

Fey stars as Kate Holbrook, a single thirty-seven-year-old career woman who's climbed the ranks high enough at her job and finally decides it's time to start a family. But after finding out she's infertile, she ends up hiring a surrogate, the white-trash Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler).

The story has one twist that the trailers are (for once) doing a good job of hiding, but other than that, this is pure Hollywood formula with unfortunately very little trace of Fey's sharp voice. (The film was written by the director, Michael McCullers, although both Fey and Poehler contributed during re-writes.)

It feels like kind of a missed opportunity, especially because this is a mainstream Hollywood comedy headlined by two female comedians, which is, even these days, embarrassingly unheard of. It's decent, and if it helps prove that women can hold their own at the box office as movie stars, cool. But it could've been great, and it's not.

It also feels, if not hypocritical, then at least short-sighted to make a big deal