We’re only a month-and-a-bit into 2025, and it’s possible that Netflix have given birth (pun unintended) to one of the year’s absolute worst filmic offerings in Amy Schumer‘s Kinda Pregnant, an absolutely unfunny “comedy” that wastes the talents of its capable cast.
A Happy Madison production – which tells you all you need to know about the kind of humour it’ll rest within – and directed by notorious Netflix helmer Tyler Spindel (who hasn’t endeared himself to audiences or critics with such fare as Father of the Year, The Wrong Missy, and The Out-Laws), Kinda Pregnant should have a sense of emotionality and humanity, given Schumer, who no doubt would have her own pregnant experiences to riff off, had a hand in penning the script.
With the usual over-glossed appearance that seems to be part of the parcel for a Netflix film, Kinda Pregnant follows Lainey (Schumer), who has only ever wanted to be a mother since she was a little girl; the opening scene introduces us to a young Lainey “delivering” her own baby with a doll on the playground. Her bestie, Kate (Jillian Bell), not nearly as enthused as a youngen beside her on the playground, has actually fallen pregnant, and Lainey, supportive as she is, can’t help but be immensely jealous of Kate’s impending motherhood.
Realising that her possibility of becoming a mother too has drastically reduced when her beau, Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.), proposes the idea of a threesome rather than marriage, Lainey unintentionally gets caught up in her own lie when, after trying on a prosthetic belly during a baby shopping trip with Kate, starts to savour the attention she gets as a “pregnant” woman. Being told how great she looks, swarms of strangers congratulating her, and realising people will give up their seats on the subway for her, Lainey can’t help but play along. It’s when she attends a Prenatal Yoga class (“Mamaste”, hilarious!) and befriends the actually pregnant Megan (Brianne Howey, one of the few performers on hand that actually delivers a grounded turn) that she starts to spiral, especially when Megan’s brother turns out to be Josh (Will Forte, making the most of terrible material by emerging as an actually sweet romantic lead), who Lainey shamelessly flirted with prior to her lie and actually started to like.
Given that Schumer has been so open about her infertility issues, it’s quite baffling as to how insensitively the subject matter of Kinda Pregnant is handled across its 98 minutes. As the screenwriter – written in conjunction with Julie Paiva, who only has the short film The Secret to her name (which has its own issues in that its director is credit is the infamous “Alan Smithee” – a pseudonym for directors whose film was clearly taken away from them and recut heavily against their wishes in ways that completely altered the film) – you’d think she’d tackle the comedy here with more care; and we’ve seen what she can do by taking her own experiences and comedically morphing them to great effect with her 2015 breakout Trainwreck. Whether or not this is the material Schumer intended, or Happy Madison ultimately overruled her and insisted on their brand of juvenile jocularity, we don’t know. What we do know is that Kinda Pregnant is not what Schumer deserves as a vehicle or what we should be spending streaming minutes on.
It’s a real shame that the film adheres to the Happy Madison formula as the aforementioned Howey, Forte and Bell are all delivering the type of work that Kinda Pregnant doesn’t deserve. And even when the film offers up a chuckle or moment of sweetness (Forte and Schumer really are quite cute together), it’s always entirely undone by sight gags or running jokes that are more distasteful and pointless than they are amusing; the two biggest culprits being Adam Sandler‘s own daughter and Laura Benanti in a bizarre cameo as a mother/daughter combo who are personally affected by Lainey’s pregnancy, and Megan’s knife-wielding son who literally stabs Lainey in her fake belly, which plays into a multitude of visual bits where she hurts herself knowing that she can’t actually harm her “baby”. It’s all very well and good for it to play out because we know the reality, but in this telling, that little boy stabs a woman he believes is pregnant…the mind baffles.
A film that could’ve been thoughtful in spite of the wrongdoings of its lead character – regardless of it aiming for a comedy inclination or not – Kinda Pregnant is both an opportunity missed with its content and a waste of its ensemble.
ONE STAR (OUT OF FIVE)
Kinda Pregnant is now streaming on Netflix.
