"Baby Mama" - What to Expect

Saturday Night Live cast members Tina Fey (2000-2006) and Amy Poehler (2001-present) co-star in "Baby Mama," a nontraditional pregnancy comedy about finding family and true happiness.

The movie was written and directed by Michael McCullers, ("Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," "Saturday Night Live") that attempts to give future "baby movies" a run for their money.

Kate Holbrook (Fey) has always put her professional life above her personal life.

She's a successful businesswoman at a health food company who seems to have it all: favor at her job, promotions calling her name, a well-to-do lifestyle.

But she begins to realize her life is missing something she can't just dream up like her ideas at work - she desperately wants a baby.

Feeling her biological clock a-ticking, (she's 37 and unmarried), she reviews her options and settles on an uncanny surrogate, Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler), to carry her child.

Kate and Angie are polar opposites in every aspect of their lives, resulting in the stubborn women clashing many times during the course of the pregnancy, a recipe calling for either a triumph or a disaster (take a wild guess which one overcomes).

The movie gives a somewhat fresh look into the surrogacy community, a world not often explored by Hollywood.

Following other successful pregnancy comedies like "Juno" (2007) and "Knocked Up" (2007), "Baby Mama" stands on its own, offering some laugh out loud moments even non-SNL fans can enjoy.

Unfortunately, it falls into the classic mistake of being extremely predictable - we already know what to expect from the expecting mothers and it's really no surprise that the babies are born without problems in the end of the movie (oops, have I said too much?).

Nearly halfway in, a bit of familiar romantic sappiness periodically leads viewers away from Kate and Angie's zany on-screen chemistry as Kate's single-father-love-interest (played by Greg Kinnear) enters and quickly (almost too quickly) sweeps her off her feet.

If that in itself doesn't shock you (sarcasm), the plethora of uterus- and pregnancy-related jokes (sometimes appropriate, other times, not so much) will either have your sides hurting from laughter or your stomach queasy from nausea.

The colorful supporting cast, including Sigourney Weaver, Steve Martin, Romany Malco, and Dax Shepard, add an extra zing to the main characters' already dynamic energy.

Those sidekicks also greatly contribute to many tongue-in-cheek, awkward, and highly comical moments taken straight off the script of an SNL episode.

Still, there were scenes where those SNL-like moments seemed to be in hibernation and I found myself wishing - hoping - that the movie would just hurry up and get to the point already.

At the end of the night when I was relieved to finally be let out of the theater, I kept thinking that I had wasted two hours of my life that I would never get back and approximately ten dollars that I could've put on gas.

But after having time to think about the interesting insight I got on surrogacy, however fictional it may be, and let the aftertaste settle in my mouth, I was glad to have seen the movie.

I give "Baby Mama" a -B for the humor I found in it, but also for not quite meeting my expectations.