Knocked Up, But Not Quite Knocked Out

Rating: 6/10 (12 April 2008)

I had such high expectations, given Rogen and Apatow's ground-breaking work in "40-year-old Virgin".
"Knocked Up" tells the story of a slacker, Ben Stone (Rogen) who gets really lucky one night at a club and finds himself doing the horizontal mambo with blonde bombshell career girl Alison Scott (Heigl). 2 mins later, the course of both their lives is altered irrevocably.
The movie explores how they adapt to each other, and to the people in their respective lives, in light of circumstances that force them together, even though they'd really rather not be.
The problem with this movie is that Rogen's character, while acute and incisive in a supporting context, can't carry a main role - certainly not in the way Steve Carrell's did in "40-year-old Virgin".
It's like the smoke without the fire, or the bang without the cracker. The one is nothing without the other, even though the reverse isn't necessarily true. Rogen, to his credit, does very well in crafting a likable loser here. And so full credit to him for that achievement.
Heigl, for her part, is really delightful in this role, but she too suffers in this movie from Apatow's unfortunate ability to create his most interesting characters in a cameo roles. Cases in point are: Paul Rudd character, his wife played by Leslie Mann, the bouncer at the club where all the trouble originally started, and Heigl's sterile plastic bosses at the TV station.
What you end up with is a patchwork quilt of very funny characters. On the whole, though, it ends up as somewhat less than the sum of its parts.