Kinda Pregnant review – Amy Schumer’s Netflix comedy is kinda disappointing

4 hours ago 1

Let me be clear: I am always rooting for Amy Schumer, though sometimes she makes it difficult. When she is good, she is great – and, for the most part, that was on Inside Amy Schumer, her zeitgeist-y Comedy Central sketch show that ran from 2013-2016. Schumer’s brand of comedy – bawdy, self-deprecating, pointing to overarching sexism while skewering certain types of white women – was both native to and critical of the pop feminist era, your oversharing best friend during the personal essay boom.

For better and, at least on the big screen, for worse, Schumer’s sensibility has remained there. Kinda Pregnant, her new film at Netflix, plays the hits Schumer is known for – shameless physical comedy, frank discussion of bodies, brash refusal to play good girl – but feels 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 underwhelming Hollywood vehicles since 2015’s Trainwrecked that have hamstrung Schumer’s talent with sub-par writing (2018’s I Feel Pretty) or plotting (2017’s Snatched).

This time, the issue is more existential: though it tries – there’s pratfall and physical gags aplenty – there’s just not that much funny to be found here. If the 2022 reboot of Inside Amy Schumer showed the limits of its topical comedy post-Trump, then Kinda Pregnant evinces the dead end of this particular style of comic fuck-up. It doesn’t help that the 100-minute film has the stale flavor of Netflix content: overlit, undercooked, checking off boxes by sticking a bunch of funny people together and hoping for the best.

The setup should be, um, fertile ground for Schumer, pregnancy and childbirth being states that warp the female body – the site of her most ruthless and revealing jokes – freighted with the cultural scripts she loves to flout. Schumer herself is no stranger to pregnancy fare, having documented her own arduous pregnancy in the 2020 docuseries Expecting Amy and mined its ribald absurdities for the 2019 standup special Growing.

Here, she plays the other side of child-free/parent friend divide (a rich topic!) as Lainy, an uncensored and increasingly unhinged Brooklyn schoolteacher in an oddly affordable Williamsburg who has long been desperate to start a family. In her early 40s and four years deep in a relationship with Dave (Damon Wayans Jr), details unknown besides being a cad, she believes she’s on the precipice of an engagement and thus her dreams. It all blows up spectacularly and, for the viewer, tiresomely – I appreciate an attempt to revive the old studio comedy but, again, pratfall too aplenty – at an inopportune time. A day after being so desperate for a ring she digs for it in a cake, Lainy learns her forever best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) is pregnant.

Besieged by jealousy – Schumer, as usual, is adept at playing a woman barging through the “I’m so excited for you” script while not really meaning it – Lainy entertains a flight of fancy: what if she just pretended she was pregnant with a fake bump? The world becomes an Elf-esque oyster, all cooing and congratulations and gifted seats on the subway. And because this movie entertains a fluid sense of magical realism and Brooklyn-as-small town, a friendship with the actually pregnant Megan (Brianne Howey), a young mom desperate to connect over the horrors and loneliness of the endeavor, whose brother just so happens to be the guy Lainy flirted with at the coffee shop (Will Forte).

Hijinks ensue with a strenuous physical edge – Kinda Pregnant derives a good bulk of its humor from Schumer stuffing a variety of objects under her shirt when caught unawares, or hiding the ruse from various parties. There are intriguing nuggets here: the way society patronizes pregnant women (and now criminalizes, though that’s smartly not mentioned; implication is enough), the crazy-making insecurities of falling behind one’s friends, how jealousy commingles with joy. Bell is particularly good as the film’s voice of reason, though still one throwing a joint baby shower with the worst parody of gen Z New Jerseyans I have seen in Shirley (Lizze Broadway) and her backwards-hat bro husband Rawn (Alex Moffat).

Ironically for a comedy so bent on the outrageous, as epitomized by Kiwi comedian Urzila Carlson’s vaping school counsellor, Kinda Pregnant finds its groove in the more grounded and honest. The tiptoeing around big changes in one’s best friendship, the tension between joy and dread, the role of a friend when another is going through something irrevocable all get mentions that hint at something sharper and stickier. But what texture exists gets steamrolled by the loud and extreme. Schumer’s style – force and exaggeration, pushing boundaries to sometimes hilarious ends – may have reached its limit.