Review: Baby Mama C

A Film Review By Stefan Vlahov

While I am not a Tina Fey fanboy, I can say that I hoped this film would do her talent and exuberance justice. My hopes were crushed early on in Baby Mama when Fey's character Kate gets an explanation as to why her chance to get pregnant is one in a million (seriously) - she has a "T-shaped uterus." This condition is very rare and is only caused by taking a now illegal drug. This drug was given to women that were already pregnant in the 50s and 60s. So the only way that Michael McCuller's screenplay may be plausible is if Kate is 80+ years old and has already been pregnant about 50 years ago. There has been no record of any woman actually being born with a T-shaped uterus as it is not genetically passed on. I am only telling you this information to expose the fact that this script was probably whipped-up by McCullers in no more than a week as he skipped over any research or fact-checking on the subject he had written it on. But that is because McCullers, appropriately focuses on the jokes in the film, rather than the plot. There are sex jokes, current events jokes, pop culture jokes, political jokes, and unfortunately for the audience, racist jokes. The humor, when appropriate, is undeniably funny and at times worth more than just a chuckle. Tina Fey and co-star Amy Poehler ,who plays the person who carries Kate's baby, are excellent in their roles, if only the script had given them worthy material. Poehler plays the crazy and disorderly surrogate mother and is over-the-top in the best sense of the phrase. One wonders what the film is attempting to portray with her character's unflinching and unstoppable madness and improperness, especially the unveiling of her traitorous actions in the third act of the film. An audience member who is willing to give McCullers more credit than he deserves may see this as an underlying anti-surrogation and/or a pro-adoption message. But McCullers shows that this is not the case in his inane screenplay, and the last ten minutes culminate into a crowd-pleasing moment so empty of any thematic weight or emotion it reminded me of... of... the last mediocre romantic comedy I saw before this one, since all of them seem to be the same these days. If Judd Apatow's films have the upper-hand in the genre, it is mostly because of his undeniable need to create melodrama that falls within his characters' arcs, and is also believable. The believability quotient at the end of Baby Mama is very low, so low in fact that it would have been more believable if the birth scene cut to the scene in the beginning of Rob Zombie's Halloween where Michael Myers is born. But of course it doesn't, and I could only look with dread as McCullers's script finally committed its greatest sin as its characters were leveled off to mere caricatures in service of his middling ways of pleasing the audiences. It is a shame too, because of the wasted good performances and otherwise funny material.