The comedian plays a woman who pretends to be pregnant in an outdated and mostly unfunny attempt to bring back studio comedy.
I always root for Amy Schumer, even though she sometimes plays it hard. When she's good, she's great — and, for the most part, that was on Inside Amy Schumer, her Comedy Central sketch show that aired from 2013 to 2016. Schumer's style of comedy — raunchy, self-deprecating, pointing out pervasive sexism while mocking certain types of white women — was both its own and critical of the era of pop feminism, your best friend who shares too much during the rise of personal essays.
Director: Tyler Spindel
Writers: Julie Paiva, Amy Schumer
Stars: Amy Schumer, Will Forte, Jillian Bell
For better and, at least on the big screen, for worse, Schumer's sensibility has remained there. Kinda Pregnant, her new Netflix movie, repeats the hits Schumer is known for (unabashed physical comedy, frank discussion of bodies, blatant refusal to play a good girl), but it seems stuck in the past, unable to generate new sparks. Written by Schumer and Julie Paiva and directed by Tyler Spindel, Kinda Pregnant continues a string of disappointing Hollywood movies since 2015’s Trainwrecked that have hamstrung Schumer’s talents with a lackluster script (2018’s I Feel Pretty) or plot (2017’s Snatched).
This time, the question is more existential: Try as she might (there are falls and physical gags aplenty), there’s just not much that’s funny here. If the 2022 reboot of Inside Amy Schumer showed the limits of her post-Trump topical comedy, then Kinda Pregnant evidences the dead end of this particular brand of comedic disaster. It doesn’t help that the 100-minute film has the stale flavor of Netflix content: overly lit, undercooked, ticking the boxes by throwing together a bunch of funny people and hoping for the best.
The context should be, ahem, fertile ground for Schumer, as pregnancy and childbirth are states that deform the female body (the site of her most ruthless and revealing jokes), laden with the cultural scripts she loves to spoof. Schumer herself is no stranger to pregnancy movies, having documented her own arduous pregnancy in the 2020 docuseries Expecting Amy and exploited its ribald absurdities for the 2019 comedy special Growing.
Here, she plays the other side of the parent-child divide (a rich topic!) as Lainy, an uncensored and increasingly unhinged Brooklyn schoolteacher in oddly affordable Williamsburg who has long been desperate to start a family. At 40 and four years into a relationship with Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.), with no details known other than him being a creep, she believes she’s on the verge of an engagement and, therefore, her dreams. It all blows up spectacularly and, for the viewer, boringly (I appreciate the attempt to revive the old studio sitcom, but, again, there’s too much nonsense) at an inopportune time. One day after being so desperate for a ring that she looks for it in a cake, Lainy learns that her best friend forever, Kate (Jillian Bell), is pregnant.
Besieged by jealousy (Schumer, as always, is adept at playing a woman who is quick to say “I’m so excited for you” without actually saying it), Lainy is swept up in a fantasy: What if she just pretended she was pregnant with a fake belly? The world becomes an Elf-esque oyster, all cooing, congratulations and gifted subway seats. And because this movie has a fluid sense of magical realism and small-town Brooklyn, a friendship develops with Megan (Brianne Howey), a pregnant young mother looking to connect with the horrors and loneliness of homework and whose brother happens to be the guy Lainy flirted with at the coffee shop (Will Forte).
The hijinks come with a grueling physical edge: Kinda Pregnant gets much of its humor from Schumer, who stuffs a variety of objects under her shirt when caught off guard, or hides the ruse at various parties. There are intriguing details here: the way society patronizes pregnant women (and now criminalizes them, though that’s not cleverly mentioned; the insinuation is enough), the maddening insecurities of falling behind friends, how jealousy mixes with joy. Bell is particularly good as the film's voice of reason, though she follows that up by hosting a joint baby shower with the worst New Jersey Gen Z parody I've ever seen in Shirley (Lizze Broadway) and her backwards-hat-wearing bro husband Rawn (Alex Moffat).
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