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Near the closing stages of Baby Mama, one of the central characters goes on to describe the basic outline of everything that came before and summarises that it 'was all just a mess'; I really couldn't say it any better than that. And while the feature does have its odd ray of hope every now and again, the vast majority of what is present is too neutered to be considered relevant and too unremarkable to be worth anyone's time. A lacklustre cast, mundane script and vague, caricature characters ensure that Baby Mama certainly isn't taxing on the ol' noggin, but it never makes up for this through its proposed sense of humour. Consisting mainly of very routine, cliché jokes based around an odd couple (rich and poor) trying to live with each other as they prepare to bring a baby into the world, the film is far too esoteric to deliver laughs outside its very thin demographic.
As a story on finding love, it's not that bad, but playing this plot line as a side-story of sorts to work alongside the comedy-orientated odd couple tangent, characterisation is notably weak, resulting in a lukewarm romance that never bubbles. As characters themselves, both central figures are mildly amusing when put together in small spaces, but when left alone quickly unravel and bare their emptiness; so while we may eventually come to find the character's interactions with each other amusing at times, the comedy never branches beyond distant chuckles; we don't feel for the characters and don't find them inherently interesting, but rather their dynamic. Unfortunately however, although this dynamic works best, or at least better than the individual personas, as mentioned above, it rarely stems outside of the typical confines of the odd-couple formula.
Kate (Tina Fey) is a successful business woman who has hired working class, dumb-blonde Angie (Amy Poehler) to be her unlikely surrogate, and after Angie decides to leave hopeless husband Carl (Dax Shepard), both eventually have to learn to live together despite their obvious differences. Yes, it's the typical odd-couple premise, and one that we have already seen in this year's What Happens in Vegas, yet what Baby Mama lacks that the aforementioned movie had is both chemistry between performers and semi-layered characters. Kate and Angie both fail to ever show much of a personality outside of their two dimensional outline and as such both performers are neglected to play out roles that demand chemistry to produce out of thin air. In fact, the movie's only real engaging performance and character comes from the underused talents of Romany Malco who gets lumbered with playing a door-man. Of the few times that I laughed during Baby Mama, most of those moments were because of this man, and the remainder usually fell to Shepard.
It's a rare thing of course to find a movie which embodies its script's themes in the way which its world is shot and presented to us through the camera, and yet director Michael McCullers goes from page to screen effectively enough. Yet, for a film about babies, multi-million dollar business and cultural stereotyping, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Baby Mama is grade-A, hammy, plastic tinsel-town with capital bore topped with sugar. So not only did I feel emotionally distant to the characters because of their two-dimensional nature, but I simply didn't care for the world they inhabited. The dialogue, along with sets, costumes, and the script's general themes are painted in pastel blues and pinks so much that all shades of humanity are lost in the director's incessant need to make his movie feel like a neutered fantasy; these aren't characters and that isn't our world in any way so why should I care? At the end of the day however, a romantic comedy's ultimate gauge of success or failure comes down purely to its chemistry between its love interests, and the frequency of its laughs; Baby Mama has little going on in any of these departments. Of course to say that the film is without any value at all would be unfair. I'm sure female audiences in a similar boat as lead character Kate may get a slight kick out of the proceedings, but anyone else will probably just feel numb and probably bored. In this respect Baby Mama avoids being unbearable, but never convinces in being anything remarkable or worthy of a look to anyone outside of its immediate audience; a comedic dud and a romantic mismatch, Baby Mama is too light-headed to be interesting and too shallow to be entertaining.
- A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)


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