Baby Mama DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

You'd have to be living under a rock in a cave to not know how hot Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have been lately. Between the duo's hilarious performances on Saturday Night Live, with Fey's Sarah Palin impersonation, Fey's 30 Rock and Poehler's hilarious supporting turns in a number of recent films like Hamlet 2 and Mr. Woodc*ck, they've regularly proved that they're two of the funniest women alive. Just with these two alone, I was looking forward to this flick Baby Mama, but it turned out to be a disappointment.

The movie revolves around Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), who's a successful VP of an organic food company who doesn't have much luck in the men department and now, still single at 37, she wants to have a baby. After exhausting other options, she finds out that pretty much her only shot at being a mother is having a surrogate mother, an eccentric woman named Angie (Amy Poehler). While the pair are quite the odd couple, they learn a lot about each other and stuff and yeah.

Don't get me wrong, there are PLENTY of hilarious moments between Fey and Poehler because they have worked with each other for so long and, from their long history of improv, they can riff off each other extremely well. While there are plenty of jokes that also fail as well, the real problem I have about this film is the story is just pretty boring. They try to throw a lot of drama in here that really just doesn't seem necessary, like the fact that Angie was really planning on conning Kate the whole time, but then doesn't because they're new friends and such. They really don't follow the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) maxim here because many aspects of the film just seem way too overcomplicated, with all sorts of little twists in the story that just take you to a weird place.

Besides Fey and Poehler, we get some nice supporting work from Dax Shepard, as Angie's conniving boyfriend Carl, Greg Kinnear, as Kate's new love interest Rob, but Sigourney Weaver is just kind of creepy as Chaffee Bicknell, the surrogate clinic lady and Steve Martin turns in just a bland and overly weird performance as Kate's boss, Barry. Maura Tierney is pretty bland as Kate's sister, Carolnie, but I dug Romany Malco as Kate's bizarre doorman Oscar, although I really don't know what he's doing in picking his films since The 40 Year Old Virgin.

I'm also surprised that this flick wasn't as good since Michael McCullers was involved as well. While he is making his directorial debut here, he was a writer in SNL and he also co-wrote Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me with Mike Myers and also wrote the hilarious and underrated Undercover Brother. To be fair, though, he did also write the terrible Austin Powers in Goldmember with Myers as well. Damn I hated that flick. There are so many flat jokes here and so much stuff that doesn't work that, even though the stuff that does work is usually really really funny, most of it is almost cancelled out by the stuff that really isn't. I think this flick is just too ambitious and tries to say and do way too much for a comedy and if they would've stuck with just Fey and Poehler throughout, without this stupid new love interest thing or the con angle, it would've worked out a lot better.

Baby Mama, while with just the involvement of Fey and Poehler, could've been a great comedy, turns out to be simply an average flick with two above-average comedy actresses and a below-average filmmaker.

We don't get a ton of stuff here. We get started with an Alternate Ending that really is just pretty stupid and unnecessary. I'm glad they didn't keep this in because it would've felt very very weird.

Deleted Scenes are next and most of them are pretty dumb. We get five scenes for a total of about six and a half minutes and you should probably just skip them all because they're not that funny at all. OK, one is pretty good, where we find out that the car they trashed wasn't really the car they thought it was, but the rest kind of suck, so avoid.

Saturday Night Live: Legacy of Laughter is next and it's brought to us by Volkswagon. I don't know why special features need a sponsor, but whatever. It's basically a nice little feature about Fey, Poehler and writer-director Michael McCullers and how they all met while doing Saturday Night Live. They talk about Lorne Michaels and a bunch of other stuff and their interviews are intercut with behind-the-scenes shots from the movie. It's only three minutes and some change, and it's pretty cool, but it should've been longer.

The last thing we get here is From Conception to Delivery: The Making of Baby Mama. This is probably the best feature on here because it's almost exactly 10 minutes long and we get some pretty cool stuff here about how this flick really came about, and how some of the key players were brought on as well. Sure, there's plenty of glad-handing kinds of things in here, but it's worth a watch.

The disc is presented in both the anamorphic widescreen format, in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and the fullscreen format on the reverse side of the disc, in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Not really sure why they shot this in 2.35:1 because it's, you know, a comedy, but whatever.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital 5.1 format.

Pretty standard stuff here. The front cover just has a title card, a tagline and a shot of both Fey and Poehler. The back has a critic quote, a few random pics, a nice synopsis, special features listing an the billing block and tech specs. Decent.

Baby Mama features two of the funniest women in comedy in Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It's just too bad they didn't pick a better movie to star in together.