Thanks for checking out the Baby Mama Review. If you’d like, you can check out the video version of the Baby Mama review at the bottom of this post.
This movie was written and directed by veteran Saturday Night Live writer Michael McCullers . It stars Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and also has Greg Kinnear, Sigourney Weaver and last but certainly not least Steve Martin.
The General Idea
Basically a successful vice president (Fey) of an organic supermarket chain wants to have a baby but has a million to one chance of ever getting pregnant. So she goes to a surrogacy center (run by Weaver ) and hires a less than responsible girl named Angie (Poehler) to carry her fertilized egg in her white trash womb. Add a little romance in the way of good old Greg Kinnear and a touch of Martin as Fey’s hippy corporate boss and you’ve got yourself Baby Mama.
The Good
Going in to see this movie I was expecting a few laughs, some yawns and a lot of placenta jokes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, while there was one placenta joke Baby Mama is a very entertaining movie. In fact it’s REALLY FUNNY (and I was sitting near men who were also dying with laughter so it’s not just for us folks with fallopian tubes).
This flick had a fantastic and properly directed cast. Goddamn is Steven Martin hilarious, I haven’t enjoyed him in a movie to this degree in a long time. He was well used in this movie, him and Fey worked great off each other and it is obvious in all of their scenes together that they are having a ball. Poehler’s physical comedy totally killed me in this, it’s not just the way she pisses in a sink, it’s everything. Dax Shepard who plays Poehler’s common law husband fully embodies the essence of idiocy for his role. Weaver and Kinnear also performed well but they had less to work with.
The dialog was great and it is shared with all of the characters (although I think Shepard wins with the highest ratio of laughs per line) . By far the best thing about Baby Mama is how perfectly the cast worked together, it really looked like the kind of movie that people couldn’t wait to go to set for.
There was so much great stuff going on, tons of strong improvisation, diggs taken at the organic food trade, there’s even a shower scene with Fey and Poehler in which McCuller pay homage to the 80’s Meryl Streep film Silkwood (I don’t think many caught the reference but regardless it was a very funny scene). It looked like everyone is having a lot of fun acting and directing and I certainly enjoyed watching.
The Bad
As much as I liked Baby Mama it was pretty predictable, especially in the 3rd act. This movie wasn’t about the story, it was about the characters and that’s fine but I knew exactly what was going to happen at the end of the movie as soon as the last act arrived which disappointed me. Also although the characters were very funny they felt a little shallow (especially Kinnear’s character). At times the movie did feel like just one hilarious sketch after another. Super funny, but a little surfacey.
Overall
I was entertained by Baby Mama, it’s humorous and it have a great cast, and it’s the kind of movie that I could bring my mom and my brother to and know that both of them would leave smiling.
More than that though for me what I really liked was this was a movie about women making choices that were right for them. One woman chose to wait to have a child, to work hard at her career and then decided to have a baby when it was right for her, through the only way that was possible; surrogacy. The other woman made the tough choice of providing someone else with the gift of new life in order to provide herself with the means to have a chance at a better life.
It’s a topical movie, it’s a funny movie and it also has a really great placenta joke, what more can one ask for out of a comedy? Overall I give this movie a 7 out of 10.
BABY MAMA REVIEW VIDEO VERSION
