Kinda Pregnant (now streaming on Netflix) is somewhat highly anticipated, being Amy Schumer’s first headlining movie role in seven years. But those of us with an Adam Sandler allergy may find their wanna-see bubble burst in the first few seconds when Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions logo appears on the screen like the comedy grim reaper emerging from the mist to usher your soul straight to Hell. But! Schumer’s co-writing credit (with Julie Paiva) is a hopeful sign, considering how funny her script for 2015’s Trainwreck, her hit debut movie vehicle, was. So we stand on the precipice of the movie’s ultimate truth: Will her talent supersede the production company’s history of sub-mediocrity? Or will that sub-mediocrity drag her down with it?  

The Gist: Ever since she was a kid, Lainy wanted to be a mom. So here she is, with her bestie Kate, both kids in the sandbox, playing Maternity Ward with their Not Cabbage Patch Dolls. Three or so decades later, they’re adults, which is no surprise, as that’s how time works. Lainy (Schumer) is 40ish and still yearning mightily to start a family. She’s been dating Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.) for four years, but he quickly becomes not-an-option when he proposes – that they have a threesome. So much for that. On top of it, Kate (Jillian Bell) just peed on the thing that tells her she’s pregnant, and the reason we know she peed on it is not because we already know how pregnancy tests work, but because we see her on the toilet sharing the happy news with her husband Mark (Joel David Moore), who asks why it’s wet. Note, this is not the final instance of bodily-function comedy in the film, for there are many farts yet to come, and there will be much rejoicing, no doubt.

And so Lainy is upset. Jealous, angry, depressed, all that. She works as an English teacher, and her reading on Romeo and Juliet transforms from a story of great romance to one about death death death. Kate is a teacher too, and one of their coworkers is Shirley (Lizze Broadway), a social-media-obsessed Gen-Z idiot who’s also pregnant and therefore has more in common with Kate than Lainy. Uh oh. Feeling unmoored, Lainy impulsively straps on a fake preggo-belly and ventures into the public, basking in all the positive attention – men giving up their seats on the subway, people saying she’s “glowing,” and all that. She meanders into a prenatal yoga class where women are encouraged to release their pent-up gas, and amidst the stink she meets Megan (Brianne Howey). They’re fast friends. Megan even shares her nipple balm with Lainy, who carries on with the pregnancy ruse, because if she didn’t, this movie obviously just wouldn’t be funny at all.

As plots like these go, the precariousness of Lainy’s fakery only gets worse. Granted, she says she’s a single mom-to-be, because lying about having a husband would be a bridge too far. She hits it off with Megan’s available brother Josh (Will Forte), a zamboni driver who seems OK with the idea of dating a pregnant woman long-term, perhaps past the end of her term, which is a problem, because her ruse has a definite expiration date. Lainy finds herself torn between two worlds/selves, the one with Megan and Josh where she’s “pregnant” and the one with Kate and Shirley and school where she’s not, although the lunatic guidance counselor, Fallon Clit (Urzila Carson), knows her secret. Yes, Fallon Clit. Please laugh. When Lainy’s two worlds intersect, we watch in horror as she hides in a bin full of stuffies at the toy store and shoves a whole turkey up her dress in a panic, stuff like that. And it gets even more worser when Megan thinks she’s finally found a true friend in Lainy: “It’s so nice to talk to someone real,” she says. Just wait til the water breaks on this plot, though, Megsies.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Schumer documented her own troublesome pregnancy in standup special Growing and reality/documentary series Expecting Amy. Kinda Pregnant doesn’t match the mediocre-plus feminism of her previous movie vehicle, I Feel Pretty. And it’s in the same vein as mom-to-be comedies like Tina Fey-Amy Poehler romp Baby Mama and the much smarter (and somehow cruder!) Pamela Adlon-directed Babes.

Performance Worth Watching: Comedies of this type usually have a Designated Scene Thief, in this case, Carson, the South Africa-by-way-of-New Zealand standup comic who delivers a few solid zingers.

Memorable Dialogue: Jackie Sandler (wife of Adam) plays the yoga instructor who guides the class through a delicate maneuver: “Up, up, up through the vagina and ouuuuuuuuuuuut the anus butt.” And in the aftermath, Lainy quips, “It smells like a queef salad in there.”

Sex and Skin: Whaddaya do when you’re wearing a fake preggers-belly and the guy you’re dating wants to have sex? Well, you’re about to find out (without nudity). 

Our Take: Pregnancy is transformational for women on a number of fronts, a truth that Kinda Pregnant addresses, somewhat, although Schumer doesn’t seem sure if she wants to lampoon it or mine it for poignantly funny observations. Not that a comedy needs to find deep and meaningful earnestness amidst the wackiness – wackiness on its own is a viable reason for a movie to exist, as long as it’s inspired, and competently executed, neither of which accurately describes Kinda Pregnant. The movie lines up a series of predictable predicaments full of one-liners ripe to be stepped on. And a film that offers no surprises inevitably undermines its own comedy, because once you see the joke coming, it quickly ceases to be funny.

And so we get mustache-waxing jokes, social media jokes, getting-stabbed-in-the-fake-belly jokes, falling-flat-on-the-fake-belly jokes, zamboni jokes, urination jokes and alpaca-semen jokes, all populating a typically frustrating idiot plot that hangs itself on the tension wire of its own drawn-out stupidity. To be blunt: I hate movies that make us gut out their protagonists’ moronic ruses – there are many, many such movies – which inevitably lead to a mortifying climax, despite the fact that they could be resolved with a single line of dialogue. Or better yet, rerouted through a different, fresher idea for a story than I Made Up A Bunch Of Desperate Lies And Don’t Know How To Get Out Of Them. Such screenplays need to be burnt to ash. Fired into the sea. Smited to their composite atoms and FedExed to the Crab Nebula. They’re bad!

Schumer wholeheartedly throws herself into the situation and its many wearisome gags, because she wrote a bunch of them. Perhaps she exhausted all her thoughtful insights about pregnancy and motherhood in her other projects; perhaps she just wanted to stop being heavy about it and make people laugh when she fall down go boom. Either way, Kinda Pregnant lacks the over-the-top, crass edginess of her best standup (and the cracking wit of Trainwreck), which was channeled through an irreverent persona that feels watered down near to drowning for this film. Maybe it’s the movie’s unavoidable Happy Madison-Netflixiness, which renders it  completely undemanding, chock-full of simplistic emotions and not nearly funny enough. 

 Our Call: Sigh – Amy Schumer’s been Netflixed. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.