Baby Mama is the type of good-natured adult comedy I want to like more than I actually do. There are some extremely funny moments and some highly agreeable performances, but overall the film moves a bit sluggishly and never catches fire in the ways it should. While the potential for greatness is definitely there, unfortunately there is a feeling of safe blandness bordering on the predictable, and while there’s little I can truly rail against here there’s just as few virtues to extol.
This is a movie that plays almost 100-percent better at home than it did in the theater. Many of the things that initially annoyed me didn’t affect me as much while sitting on my couch. The flaws were still there, I just was able to shrug them off a bit easier. That’s not exactly a recommendation, but it still speaks volumes as to how the majority of audiences will probably respond.
The film revolves around Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey). Her biological clock is ticking and she is running out of time to have the baby she wants so dearly. Enter Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), a dim bulb potential surrogate mother willing to help the single career woman out. Together the pair build a surprisingly close relationship, but when a sexy small business owner (Greg Kinnear), a fantastically stupid common law husband (Dax Shepard) and potentially explosive secret threatens to destroy everything, it will take all of Kate and Angie’s energies to put things right and fix a friendship on the verge of blossoming.
Fey is a winningly eccentric performer who deserves to be a movie star. At times her line readings are so wittily iconic and uproarious I almost could have cried they made me laugh so hard. More, she and Poehler have electric chemistry honed to near perfection during their stint on “Saturday Night Live,” and as “30 Rock” and Mean Girls have shown the multitalented entertainer is also one of the more exciting and inspiring comedic writers working today. Problem is, this isn’t her screenplay.
Writer/director Michael McCullers has crafted a humdinger of an engaging premise but his execution never goes beyond the safe and predictable. He stretches things out to an almost interminable length. What should be a 90-minute exercise in tightly-wound hilarity instead wallows in sporadically funny obviousness languidly waddling to an all-too familiar conclusion.
Universal’s DVD release of Baby Mama offers up a dual-layer flipper disc featuring both 1.85:1 Widescreen and Full Screen transfers of the film. Extras include a collection of relatively forgettable deleted scenes, a featurette on “Saturday Night Live” (bizarrely ‘sponsored’ by Volkswagen), a surprisingly solid alternate ending (that’s almost better than the real one) and a standard behind-the-scenes doc entitled “From Delivery to Conception: The Making of Baby Mama.”
There is also a great audio commentary featuring McCullers, producer Lorne Michaels and stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Not only does the quartet seem to be having a blast revisiting their film, they also openly talk about the making of the picture that’s surprisingly introspective and comprehensive. Additionally, my initial viewing thoughts that the movie’s best moments (Poehler unleashing a string of increasingly outlandish lies to a highly incredulous Kinnear, the pre-birth madly psychotic dash through the hospital, “My avatar is dressed like a whore!”) were adlibbed or scripted by the two stars themselves prove to be accurate, the actresses admitting as much time and time again to the exuberant thanks of McCullers.
It must be said, there are a couple of aces in the deck who almost make this thing worth the price of purchase all on their lonesome. Both Steve Martin and especially Sigourney Weaver are just phenomenal. I also think both Fey and Poehler knock it out of the park on more than couple of occasions. I just wish the movie was more solidly entertaining start to finish, and for all its strengths script problems make Baby Mama one comedy whose ultimate delivery proved to be disappointingly premature.
