Netflix's latest comedy "Kinda Pregnant" has one joke, and that's "what if Amy Schumer pretended to be pregnant." It fails the feeble concept with an anemic execution, the kind where for almost 100 minutes you sit surprised on your couch, wondering how a stacked cast like Schumer and costars Jillian Bell, Will Forte and Damon Wayans Jr., among others, fail to take this idea in any interesting direction. No, instead, a make-believe pregnant Amy crashes into a wall, catches her tummy on fire and falls on it twice. Har he har har.
Schumer stars as Lainy, a grade-school teacher who wants nothing more than to be a wife and mother. In fact, she's convinced her longtime boyfriend Dave (Wayans Jr.) is going to propose. Oh he proposes alright, but for a threesome, not marriage. Oh, did I forget to mention that Adam Sandler is a producer?
You can just taste his touch all over this; exactly what a film about pregnancy needs.
Freshly single, she then learns that her coworker and best friend Kate (Bell) is pregnant, which is apparently all it takes for Lainy to don an artificial baby bump, stolen of course, in a fit of jealousy. And when wearing it out one day (I dunno, to "test it out" or something, the ordeal's genesis is pretty murky), she winds up making a new friend (Megan, played by Brianne Howey), who's brother Josh (Forte) is temporarily staying with. But Lainy already knows Josh, having flirted with him at a coffee shop during that all-too brief window in the runtime where she was single but not yet falsely expecting. She likes him and he likes her (culminating in one of the least sexy, or funny, sex scenes I've ever seen), but I'm getting ahead of myself. What matters is she's now in too deep with her lie, and despite knowing she's going to have to eventually come clean, she doesn't until the script demands. If only the script demanded something else, like a punchline that didn't involve swollen body parts, farting or puking, but I digress.
The narrative goes on and on, finding new but never interesting situations for those who know she isn't "with child" to almost cross paths with those who think she, be it at a Toys R Us (gotta get that product placement in), baby shower, or a, er, romantic boat? And when these lives do cross, all she needs to do is make something up quick or just turn her body just so that it doesn't raise any suspicions. You would think the fact that she never looks any more "pregnant" would raise some questions, but then again, the pregnant characters are either thin, big or bigger within the matter of only a few scenes that it's impossible to know the timeline
It's so egregious that a decently funny film would have make a joke about it. Alas, this is not that decently funny film.
What might have been interesting would be if Lainy's parents or something spotted her, for example, but the film firmly establishes her as an only child who's parents died when she was young, so that when her falsehoods inevitably show, she has some level of built-in sympathy. For the make-believe characters that populate this movie I mean, not at all anything that ever resembles any actual human that's ever existed anywhere.
