Beauty and the beast, Judd Apatow's style

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2007)

In director Judd Apatow's follow-up to his 2005 sleeper hit "The 40-year old virgin", Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a young and sexy TV presenter find herself pregnant after a one night-stand with Ben Stone, a twenty-something overweight unemployed pothead and looser living without any revenue with his stone-slackers roommates. Despite their differences, they try to make the best of the situation.
Alfred Hitchcock once describe a kind of movie which are pleasant to watch and leave you satisfied when you go out from the theater but then, at midnight, when you open your fridge for a snack and think a little bit more about it, you realize it didn't really make sense and was nowhere as good as you thought it was. "Knocked up" is this kind of movie.
It is entertaining, funny and well played but, on a second thought not very good. Part of the problem comes from the fact that Alison and Ben don't belong to the same movie. Alison and her family remain believable characters even though some aspects of their life and personalities are exaggerated for comedic purpose. On the other hand, Ben's entourage looks like castaways from "Napoleon dynamite" or some other over-the-top comedy and are totally unrealistic. This is particularly problematic for the character of Ben who interacts with both groups: hence, he sometimes appears as an outrageous caricature (as when he doesn't realize that it might not be very wise on a first date with a woman way out of your league to mention that you and your pothead friends are currently working on building a porn website. But since the porn website is how Alison later finds back Ben's trail, I suppose we can simply attribute that to lazy screen writing), other times as a more mature and reality-grounded character.
Another problem is that Apatow seems to run out of ideas midway through the movie. Once Alison and Ben decide to keep the baby, they start dating and things go well. But ultimately, Alison breaks up with Ben. At this point, the movie just run into free wheels, Apatow wasting his time with comedic fillers bringing nothing to the plot so that, when it's time to come back to the plot, what should have been major development in the story are rushed out: when Ben finally graduates from retarded teenager to responsible adult, it is through a montage and, when it's time for Allison to give birth, Ben and her simply goes back together as if Alison's reasons for breaking from Ben in the first place never really mattered, a simple device to keep the plot boiling.
Finally, this is probably the first movie where I saw product placement for another movie playing at the same time in the theater: "Spiderman 3", also produced by Sony and released just a few week before "Knocked up" in theaters, is referenced twice, the characters expressing their urgent desire to see it, and James Franco, who stars in "Spiderman 3", makes a cameo, appearing in Alison's TV show where he discusses, you guessed it, his role in "Spiderman 3"!