Amy Schumer’s movie star run was a short and underwhelming one. Ten years ago, after she was previously best known for stand-up comedy and a Comedy Central sketch series, she starred in Trainwreck. That was a Judd Apatow-directed movie that took the usual Apatow formula—a raunchy comedy about an overgrown manchild, defeating his worst impulses to belatedly grow up—and adapted it to a female protagonist.
Trainwreck was a huge hit and led to more starring roles for Schumer. But the first two—Snatched and I Feel Pretty—were atrocious, swiftly sending Schumer back to stand-up, television, and voice work, although she did show some promise as a character actress in 2021’s The Humans. Schumer, in particular, seemed to emerge as a major loser from that brief period when it was decided that liberal white women are society’s biggest villains.
Kinda Pregnant, a Netflix movie that Schumer stars in and co-wrote, is a return to the Trainwreck formula, complete with Schumer writing and a love interest played by a SNL alum (Bill Hader then, Will Forte now). The result is a disaster that’s in “worst movie of the year” territory.
It comes from a director, Tyler Spindel, whose best-known credit is that he’s Adam Sandler’s nephew. Spindel is the go-to director of Happy Madison Netflix films in which Sandler himself doesn’t appear. The biggest problem with the film is that Schumer’s character isn’t just flighty or weird, she’s insane. It’s one thing when the immature, idiotic protagonist is in their early-20s. When they’re in their 40s, it’s another entirely. While watching Kinda Pregnant, I audibly groaned more times than I laughed.
Schumer plays Lainy, a teacher in her early-40s who, after she’s dumped by her boyfriend (Damon Wayans, Jr.), falls into a spiral upon discovery that her best friend (Jillian Bell) is pregnant. Lonely and starved for attention, she decides to fake being pregnant.
This puts her in a position to appear pregnant about half the time, to half the people she knows, and not appear pregnant to the others, and sometimes have to juggle being in the same room with both groups of people, a la the restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire. If this sounds funny, it’s not.
The writing in Kinda Pregnant is so bad that it renders funny people, starting with Schumer, with nothing to do. Jillian Bell’s one scene in Inherent Vice is legendary. Will Forte is a major comedy talent, while Chris Geere starred in You’re the Worst, a groundbreaking TV show about a toxic relationship. Forte’s character is a personality-free nonentity, while Geere and Joel David Moore, as the husbands of Schumer’s two friends, might as well be the same guy.
There was a different streaming comedy last year called Babes, which was also about a woman (Ilana Glazer) being jealous of her pregnant friend, although in that case, rather than fake it, she just went ahead and got pregnant herself. The two movies had a lot in common, including a star who used to be on Comedy Central, a cast full of people who’d done much better work, and too much time spent on minor supporting characters showing up and riffing. The difference is that what happened in Babes at least bore a slight resemblance to real human behavior.