Happy Madison romantic comedies are very much of a piece. There’s the hapless protagonist, who we are supposed to love despite, or perhaps because of, their faults. There’s the protagonist’s best friend, tirelessly loyal to the protagonist, whom the protagonist will slightly betray over the course of the story. There’s the annoying other friend, an outsized personality who longs to be best friends with the other two, but they’re having none of it. There’s the romantic interest, whose attentions toward the protagonist always seem a little unlikely. And there’s Jackie Sandler, Adam’s wife, whose role is small enough to hide some of her deficiencies as a performer, but who we always notice anyway. (Adam Sandler being the main creative force behind the production company, whose deal with Netflix has now been running since, oh, 2006.)

In Tyler Spindel’s Kinda Pregnant, these roles are played by Amy Schumer, Jillian Bell, Kiwi comic Urzila Carlson and Will Forte, respectively, and at least some of those names should create in us a sense of optimism. Unfortunately, another defining trait of Happy Madison romantic comedies is that they are edifices built from broad and poorly written jokes, and that they are directed by Tyler Spindel, who was also responsible for such typically unfortunate entries as The Wrong Missy and The Out-Laws. The fact that Schumer is also a co-writer should have given us more hope, but Kinda Pregnant isn’t even kinda funny, though it tries hard enough to be so that an unwitting smile does occasionally creep across our faces.

A faked pregnancy is just the sort of forgivable flaw we are supposed to love in our Happy Madison protagonist, especially since it is not used specifically to hurt anyone or gain her any sort of real advantage, such as maternity leave. In fact, Lainy Newton (Schumer) straps on a pregnancy belly on a lark, and then due to the sort of contrivances we often see in such movies, is mistaken for actually pregnant and just lets the resulting consequences cascade onward as they often do. She’s upset about not being proposed to her by her boyfriend of four years (Damon Wayans Jr.), who instead invited her to a fancy dinner to “propose” that they have a threesome. Instead of the path to domestic bliss she thought was opening up in front of her, it’s a path to extraordinary self doubt – and envy, since her BFF Kate (Bell) has just learned of her own bun in the oven.

As a way to see how the other half lives, Lainy attends a pregnancy yoga class, which is also where we get Jackie Sandler’s one scene. There she meets the legitimately pregnant Megan (Brianne Howey), who defends her from the unwanted interactions of Sandler’s yoga instructor after the first of about ten times Lainey lands directly on her baby bump. Megan offers to hang out, and since Lainey’s relationship with Kate is strained over her actual pregnancy and Kate’s growing bond with an obnoxious fellow teacher (Lizze Broadway), also pregnant, Lainey is seeking another form of female companionship. Of course, she’s still looking for new male companionship, who arrives in the form of Josh (Forte), whom she meets at a coffee shop – and who also happens to be Megan’s brother. (If you are looking for a movie low on contrivances, look elsewhere.) Unfortunately, Josh also thinks Lainey’s pregnant.

The high concept at the heart of Kinda Pregnant might work, as it is a reasonable thing to make a movie about. Every protagonist in every romantic comedy you’ve ever seen has a secret they are trying to hide, and must play different scenarios differently depending on who knows about the secret and who doesn’t. Like every other romantic comedy protagonist, Lainy has moments where she opens her mouth to confess, only to have the other person stop her from speaking with some new piece of information that forces her to double down.

But there’s only so much broad application of the high concept we can take. Not only is there the constant damage being apparently done to her unborn foetus – and some of these do kinda work – but there’s also the extremely poor ability of other characters to detect that the size of her bump is changing depending on which nearest object she stuffs into her shirt at a moment’s notice. That many of these are other women, other pregnant women, just makes them too stupid to be credible, even in a scenario that asks us to suspend a lot of disbelief.

Then there’s the overall broadness and vulgarity, staples in these descendants of Adam Sandler’s brain that have worn thin after 30 years. Carlson, the Kiwi comic, is particularly unfortunate in this regard, as she plays a foul-mouthed guidance counsellor who is always vaping in the school hallways and whose traits are so brash and disagreeable that it is impossible for us to imagine Lainey and Kate tolerating her for five minutes, let alone welcoming her into their BFF circle. Forte is just the sort of nice presence to offset these tendencies, but his entrance in the narrative comes late enough – maybe 15 minutes in – that you’re already more inclined to feel sad for him than to hope he’s here to save the day. He does not save the day.

Schumer herself does have this balance down between hapless, hopeless, useless and well-meaning. Despite her own inherent crass streak that informs the proceedings, she’s capable of playing the emotions required in a few scenes that remind us that Lainey is a broken person, even if she got there through many of her own poor decisions and deranged responses to various stimuli. It’s enough that you also kinda want to forgive the faults of this movie, in addition to forgiving Lainey’s faults. Unfortunately, it’s also only enough to keep Kinda Pregnant out of the very basement of your potential scorn.

 

Kinda Pregnant is currently streaming on Netflix.