Number One on Netflix is a weekly spotlight on whatever is currently the most popular thing on the world’s most popular streaming service. Sometimes it’ll be a movie. Sometimes it’ll be a TV show. Whatever it is, a lot of people are clearly watching, and we’ll try to understand why with a quick review. Today, we’re looking at the new Amy Schumer-starring romantic comedy Kinda Pregnant.
Netflix subscribers, I have a beef with you. Most of this week, the 2022 movie The Menu was the most-watched film on the service, and so I was looking forward to ranting about that movie — about both the ways in which I don’t think it’s a successful satire, as well as the cultural forces currently at play which might make audiences interested in a movie that’s fundamentally about eating the rich.
But nooooo, along came Amy Schumer and her newest rom-com, and instead here we are with Kinda Pregnant, a movie that has nothing profound to say about where we are as a culture, but does at least include a reasonably funny performance from Will Forte and some cute moments. Maybe that’s its own cultural statement: In times of upheaval, we just want to watch attractive funny people fall in love despite a series of misunderstandings and lies. It sends a message that’s about as subtle as The Menu’s whole cheeseburger thing, and maybe more accurate in the long run.
So much of Kinda Pregnant, directed by Tyler Spindel, is painfully paint by numbers. At the beginning of the film, our gal Lainy (Schumer) is excited because her boyfriend Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.) is taking her out for a big fancy dinner, and she’s pretty sure that means a proposal of marriage is coming her way. Anyone who has ever seen a rom-com before knows to expect that Dave will not be presenting her with a ring, though Kinda Pregnant gets exactly one half-point in its favor for coming up with a relatively fresh reason for Lainy to break up with him during said dinner.
Newly single, Lainy’s also bummed because her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) just got pregnant, and Lainy feels left behind. So one day, just to feel special, Lainy puts on a fake pregnancy bump, and while out and about enjoying the special attention pregnant women receive (if they’re not being murdered by their partners), she makes a new friend whose brother Josh (the aforementioned Will Forte) is also quality love interest material. Okay, that’s despite Josh being recently single himself, and living in his sister’s garage. They have cute banter, at least!
So now Lainy is lying to her new friends about being pregnant and trying to keep this ruse from her older friends. There are numerous sight gags built around Schumer crashing bump-first into walls, floors, and other surfaces; probably the funniest one is when Josh’s nephew literally stabs her in the (fake) belly with a giant kitchen knife. Schumer’s not the only one who gets to participate in the more physical moments of comedy, though, as Forte proves he’s game for literally anything, and Urzila Carlson, a comedian hailing from Australia/New Zealand, gets plenty of big silly moments to play.
It’s all in service to a narrative structure you can predict sight unseen: The girl tells the big lie, spends the second act of the movie doing her best to keep the lie alive despite various complications, eventually gets caught, and then spends the remaining screen time trying to make amends. Any tweaks to that formula are very minimal.
This honestly feels like a shame, given Schumer’s track record in this area: Her previous rom-coms, Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty, were both unconventional spins on the genre, and her Hulu dramedy series Life & Beth showed her capable of going deeper not just as a performer, but as a writer and director. While Schumer didn’t write I Feel Pretty, she did write Trainwreck and co-wrote Kinda Pregnant with Julie Paiva — this movie would be less frustrating if we didn’t know that she’s capable of more.
And let’s not get into the significance of telling stories about pregnancy in a post-Roe era, because Kinda Pregnant sure doesn’t think that’s a topic of interest, beyond offering some thrown-away support for a woman’s right to choose. Lainy just wants to be a mom! Nothing at all complicated about that these days.
Kinda Pregnant is one of those movies where you feel like the intention is to keep things kinda grounded, and then you get a pregnancy yoga class where the emphasis is on queefing and a public school teacher doing things in class that, in the real world, would get her instantly fired. (Things like setting books on fire, to be clear. Not, say, things like talking about the existence of racism in American history.)
The supporting cast features a lot of favorites, from Jillian Bell getting to show her more nuanced side to great effect, to Joel David Moore, Chris Geere, and Alex Moffat all appearing as soon-to-be dads who have no idea what they’re doing (but each in their own unique way). And Schumer herself remains as funny and fearless as ever, with much of the physical comedy generating real laughs thanks to her commitment, enabled often by Forte’s own solid instincts.
It may go out of its way to avoid being as political as this article ended up being, but Kinda Pregnant is a relatively painless, if predictable, diversion. Which perhaps explains its popularity this week, and perhaps beyond then. Maybe we should just be grateful that Kinda Pregnant was even allowed to say that women have a right to choose. Who knows where that will stand in a year’s time.
Kinda Pregnant is streaming now on Netflix.