Directed by Michael McCullers
This movie was not released in cinemas across the region; it rather slipped in like a thief. There are no posters advertising it anywhere in the cinema. You would not actually know that it was showing 's it is like a phantom movie. This does not bode well. It can only mean that the distributors knew they had a stinker and did not bother promoting it.
A debut feature film by director Michael McCullers, most of the actors are unknown to non-American audiences and I do not really know why they bothered. It is not that "Baby Mama" is unwatchable; it is just that it is totally pointless.
Tina Fey plays Kate Holbrook who at 37 is vice-president of an organic food store conglomerate. She has an enviable lifestyle but the one thing she wants is a baby. Unfortunately, she has a T shaped uterus, which means that her chances of conceiving are one in a million. In desperation, she goes to an agency who can arrange for a surrogate mother to carry her fertilized egg for the cool sum of $100,000 (63,000 euros).
Enter Angie (Amy Poehler) who is twenty something going on six and what Americans call "trailer trash." When she splits up with her similarly hillbilly boyfriend, she moves in with Kate.
That sets up the conflict that takes up much of the movie. Kate is the sort of control freak planning maniac who has put a child lock on her toilet even though she does not have a child yet. Angie is the sort of person who pees in the sink when she cannot workout how to open the toilet child lock. This is the one good joke in the movie.
It turns out that Angie is not pregnant because the procedure did not work and she and her boyfriend Carl (Dax Shepard) are just out to scam Kate.
Kate drags her to the antenatal clinic and just when she is about to confess, it turns out that one of them is pregnant after all. But is the baby Kate's or Angie's?
You can work out how this is going to turn out.
Predictability is not this film's only vice. I am sure I am not the only one who thinks that comedies are supposed to be funny or that you go to the cinema to see a spectacle that you cannot see on TV, that the plots should have some resemblance of originality and that you care about the characters or their situations. I was just, well… bored.
Part of the problem is that Tina Fey is just not a very good actor. I never heard of her before but apparently she has done a lot of good stuff on television.
This film did answer some questions that need answering. Like where do aging female actors and comedians go when they're too old to be leading women and are not funny anymore? The answer is they make bad movies like this.
Sigourney Weaver plays the owner of the agency and is extremely fertile herself. I checked out her age and that is just is not possible, she is 59.
Steve Martin is the Buddhist boss of the supermarket chain. His turn was so embarrassingly tedious and unfunny that I found myself wishing the scene would end every time he was on the screen.
Most of the rest of the cast are newcomers to the silver screen and I bet they were hoping this would be their break-out movie. Well they can live in hope.
Still that leaves the question of what Greg Kinnear is doing in the film 's he should be at the top of his game. He plays the love interest, a former corporate lawyer who has turned his back on that cutthroat world to sell fruit smoothies.
I think he was just in it for the money. You get the impression that McCuller was going through the motions when he put together this rubbish. Overall, "Baby Mama" is a total waste of time and definitely not worth the price of admission.
Now playing in all three Baltic states
