KINDA PREGNANT - Mark Reviews Movies

Kinda Pregnant, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 5, 2025

It's typically a bad idea to attempt to assign rules to comedy, if only because the notion is counterintuitive. Rules imply standardization and predictability, and generally speaking, a joke one can see coming a mile away isn't that funny. One can gauge exactly what Kinda Pregnant will do as soon as its setup is in place, because it follows the rules of a particular formula, and why the actual premise won't work as a comedy, because the movie doesn't establish its own rules for who its characters are and why the gimmick is supposed to be funny.

This is a cowardly sort of comedy that has become too prevalent of late. It features a main character who is not a particularly good person and does an inherently dishonest thing to start the plot in motion, but because she's the protagonist, the filmmakers assume we have to sympathize with her. In this story, Lainy (Amy Schumer) is dumped by a boyfriend she thought she would marry and have a family with, discovers her best friend is pregnant, and, after an innocent misunderstanding involving a fake belly, decides to pretend to be pregnant.

The concept is, admittedly, kind of amusing, but for it to function as a joke, there must at least be some reason for Lainy to carry out her deception. There isn't really one here, because Lainy is so spongy as a character. She's self-involved enough to fake pregnancy for attention, but she's also self-aware enough to comprehend that it's wrong and that the deception will utterly fail at a certain point. The only way the screenplay, written by Schumer and Julie Paiva, works under these conditions is if Lainy is, well, stupid enough to think that it could.

She's not, though, because the façade requires a lot of planning and improvisational thinking under these contrived circumstances, too. Basically, the filmmakers have devised a conceit, but they haven't determined how to make it actually work. On top of that, the whole thing is a tonal mess, trying to have fun with Lainy's deceit but also attempting to make her plight worthy of a lot of sympathy. In doing both, the result is the worst possible approach to either option.

Trying to explain the elaborate setup to how and why Lainy puts on that fake-pregnancy belly and decides to pretend to be pregnant in some situations but not others would take up most of this review. That's not a good sign for what's essentially a one-joke movie.

The basics, though, are that she's betrayed (somehow missing that he's apparently a serial philanderer over the course of four years of dating) by boyfriend Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.), learns that her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) is pregnant, and gets special attention from a woman at a maternity shop while trying on the phony belly. Oh, she also randomly meets Josh (Will Forte) at a coffee shop, and because they hit it off in about a minute's worth of talking, he'll obviously be the potential love interest later.

Anyway, Lainy feels ignored by Kate, leading her to wear the fake bump around town and while attending a yoga class for pregnant women. There, she meets Megan (Brianne Howey), who's pregnant with her soon-to-be second child and the two become friends. To be fair, Lainy wants to tell Megan that she isn't pregnant, but unsurprising surprise, Josh, who is Megan's brother, shows up just before Lainy tells the truth. Now, she's lying to Megan, who's having a difficult time with being pregnant, and Josh, whom Lainy wants to date, and for some reason, the movie presumes we'll still be sympathetic toward this liar and the completely convoluted lie she attempts to maintain.

When the movie isn't trying and embarrassingly failing to be a romantic comedy or to talk about the difficulties of pregnancy, the humor is entirely forced. Lainy is over-the-top as a scorned lover, leading her to burn books in the classroom where she teaches, and an apparent magnet for pratfalls and other low bits of physical comedy, such as hitting a piñata so hard that she knocks co-worker Fallon (Urzila Carlson), who earlier points out she doesn't know how to swim out of the blue, into a pool.

As a comedian, Schumer is smarter than such gags, and as an actress, she has shown to be much more capable than this. Hopefully, she remembers that after the debacle of Kinda Pregnant, which is only surprising in just how stagnant it is in its attempts at comedy and how phony it is when trying to be sincere.

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