I love Tina Fey. I loved the movie she wrote, Mean Girls. She’s smart, sexy, funny and endearingly normal and accessible. I love 30 Rock. Amy Poehler has great comic timing, even if she always sounds like she’s making fun of her own line reading. Together they snap, crackle, and pop – and it’s no surprise Fey would want to write a vehicle for them to interact as such opposites. I just wish all these things could have been in a funny movie. It’s weird – all the jokes are, on paper, funny. On screen they just seem like the inevitable, the only thing to say, and their zing zags off into bland, familiar territory. Nearly all the best jokes in the movie are ruined by the preview as well; though the preview implies that there is a follow up to the line spoiled by the preview, a follow up laugh to “what if that had been poop?” But no – that’s the sole punchline.

The movie pokes gentle fun at wacky, underused characters (Steve Martin’s uberhippie corporate crunchy vibe, Sigourney Weaver’s self-satisfied and beatific surrogacy agent, Holland Taylor’s shrewish mother), but doesn’t put those great characters into a situation that will generate tension and laughs. We’re just meant to observe and just agree, yes, that person, that situation, that whatever certainly is absurd – Martin in particular. His scenes are “oh yeah I have seen guys like that…” which peters into “Ok go somewhere with this please.” It’s observational humor stretched into a feature. It would have been great to see Fey’s baby obsession ruin more than just a first date (a character-building gag that could have repeatedly paid off throughout the story), or Poehler’s lack of awareness of common sense really cause some friction beyond gum on a coffee table. (No spoilers; these are all in the previews.)

Fey’s character is baby-crazy to the extreme, and a few of her moments conveying that echo the wit she shows every week on 30 Rock. Poehler’s character is no doubt a gas to play – she’s trashy and obnoxious, more ignorant than stupid – but after a while we need her to have some consequences or incited incidents from her ways. The plot takes a couple of narrow turns, but gets on board to a maternity-driven show of non-funny mediocrity once all the kinks are worked out for the audience. I was so sad that it wasn’t as funny as Mean Girls.

Our lovely lead is not self-conscious, she’s not vain, she can deliver a line, but the material did not coalesce into something besides pointing at something funny and saying, “hey, that’s funny alright!” The cast is full of strong comedic actors with a potentially great premise, but it just doesn’t fly. I’m sorry, Tina!

MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 4/25/08
Time in minutes 96
Director Michael McCullers
Studio Universal Pictures

Posted in Catch it on HBO
Tags: comedy

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Catch it on HBO . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.