‘Kinda Pregnant’ Review: Kinda Unwatchable
Amy Schumer and Tyler Spindel destroy the joyful nature of screwball comedies with the horrifically unfunny Kinda Pregnant, which gets progressively worse as its eternal ninety-minute runtime stretches to unbearable heights.
Amy Schumer may be the first anti-funny comedian. There hasn’t been a single movie, stand-up special, or live performance in which she took part that was remotely hilarious or even watchable. Can we not forget one of the worst-ever hosting gigs in Academy Awards history? Granted, no one talked about how bad she was (Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes innocent) at the end of the show, thanks to Will Smith, but I remember how painful her opening monologue jokes were, even more, when the audience partook in forced laughter since the entire world was watching.
However, her latest project, Kinda Pregnant, is not as bad as her previous work. It’s somehow worse, and watching it feels like a form of torture that could make you admit your worst and most offending sins. Directed by Adam Sandler’s nephew Tyler Spindel, whose talentless filmography includes the terrible The Wrong Missy and The Out-Laws, the film follows Schumer as the shrieking and narcissistic Lainy, who fakes being pregnant after her best friend, Kate (Jillian Bell) announces she is expecting. It’s nothing new, and the conceit could work if Schumer and co-writer Julie Paiva would treat it somewhat decently, but that seems like a big ask for a comedian who has thrived over the years on pure vulgarity through her routines or even feature film appearances.
The movie begins with a telegraphed “break-up” scene, as Lainy believes her long-time boyfriend Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.) will propose to her on their anniversary. Dave instead wants to take their relationship to the “next level” by proposing…a threesome. That punchline was unexpected, but what follows sets up how truly annoying and unbearable this 98-minute-long affair will be. Lainy destroys their heart-shaped cake and begins to yell so violently in a fit of rage that her sadness becomes unsolvable. Now, her loud yelling is supposed to be funny, in how Spindel stages Schumer’s movements within the scene as slapstick, but it’s in actuality so painful to sit through that many of you will likely turn it off to preserve your calm mental state.
Yet, since this critic is willing to punish himself for you, I sat through the entire thing and frequently paused on many occasions to take long walking breaks around my couch, drink some water, and stare at my television to ask, “What am I doing?” Let’s just say that this viewing approach didn’t work in attempting to preserve my composure by the time the credits rolled. Kinda Pregnant rattled me in such a negative way that I began to question if this profession of film criticism is truly for me if I have to sit through more cynical and time-wasting exercises like this one. Of course, a good critic will attempt to skip the trailers or anything that may influence them in their opinions towards a film. They will hope that every movie has a chance to be good, and my intentions in viewing Kinda Pregnant and providing this review were indeed benevolent. I’m not a fan of Amy Schumer, but who knows, perhaps she can turn this ship around and make me a fan through her collaboration with Happy Madison Productions. Spoiler: she didn’t.
I’ve watched many bad films, new and old, in my lifetime, and firmly believe that critics who only watch well-reviewed movies and want to solely “spread positivity” do themselves a disservice. You’re a critic. Your job is to assess the quality of a film. You cannot blanket give five stars to everything, as easy as the job may get if you decide to follow this bad. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and you can’t sugarcoat this inextricable fact, especially when an audience member may trust you with your opinion. Sometimes, you may be screaming into a void, and no one’s listening. Other times, people value your opinions and actively read your work. If you’re going into the job of criticism without providing, you know, criticism, perhaps find another line of work?
This does not mean hammering every single bad film as a flaming hot piece of garbage or acting like an elitist snob, which, unfortunately, some do. You want to give your audience trust that you took the time out of your busy schedule to always be honest in your opinions on movies to encourage Hollywood to raise their standards. That may be futile, but one must try. In doing so, you have to be exposed to terrible stuff since it will set your standards in what you consider to be good or bad. That means, yes, eventually watching The Room or any film directed by Uwe Boll if you’ve not done so already. It is necessary to see what constitutes “great” filmmaking and what shapes a flimsy production because your arguments as a critic will be much stronger if you routinely (though in small doses) expose yourself to shoddy, nearly unwatchable work.
Yet, with all that said, I wouldn’t wish that my worst enemy watches Kinda Pregnant. It’s a film so insulting with the precious, finite time we have on this Earth that one hopes that a “negative star” rating gets implemented and that movies can potentially be unreleased if its sole purpose is to rob us of the precious minutes we have in our individual lives. This is a movie that Netflix expects people to tune in and enjoy instead of working with far more talented comedians and artists in making “content” whose perennity will last longer than a cog in the algorithm. The mere act of pressing play on the movie and watching what unfolds is so painful and agonizing that each part of your body will physically beg you to stop.
There’s the age-old joke that “watching paint dry” may be funnier than sitting through an Amy Schumer routine, but this goes beyond that. Doing literally anything else may be far more productive and rewarding for you than ever wanting to see this refuse of a “film,” if we can call it that. A bad comedy isn’t funny, but it’s usually harmless enough that we don’t necessarily regret having wasted our time watching such poorly written and acted work. Grown Ups, for example, is bad, but there’s enough of an affable chemistry between Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Kevin James that we eventually warm up to their unfunny and perverse antics. The burp snart is completely humorless and an easy bodily function joke that gets more painful each time James’ character does it. Yet, it also gives us an idea of what Sander and company think an audience will like when watching a movie with no plot but loosely connected situations where its lead stars are just having fun without much thought put into its screenplay and storytelling.
Kinda Pregnant isn’t just bad in the pure sense of the word, it’s criminal. Criminal in how Spindel knows that he is robbing us of 98 minutes, with little to no shame. Criminal in how we are forced to spend what feels like a hundred hours and a half with an egotistical sociopath who befriends an actually pregnant lady (played by Brianne Howey) and falls in love with her mild-mannered brother (played by Will Forte), who is so impressed by Lainey’s “transparency” (she lies so much it becomes convincing) he also falls in love with her. Of course, they eventually find out that she’s not pregnant, and the scene itself is so embarrassingly conceived I had to pause the film for half an hour to calm myself. Maybe that’s why it was released for streaming: so that audiences are able to stop whenever they want and determine if this is all truly worth it.
It’s not. It’s really not. Why do these films exist? Is it a sick joke to punish us all? If that’s what it is, then they’ve succeeded in priming us for what Hell may potentially look like. It’s essential, yes, to watch bad movies and to continuously contrast them with the “good” standards of the past and present. Yet, no person of sound mind and body who continuously explores cinema’s past and present, whether good or bad, could ever think Kinda Pregnant will bring them something worthwhile. And no person of sound mind and body would ever actively sit down in front of their television to watch it in the first place. I’ve set limits in the past on what is worth covering and talking about in various media spaces. Angel Studios and Christian propaganda is an immediate no-no, especially as a lapsed Catholic. Direct-to-Hallmark stuff? Not my thing, although one has to understand that millions of people worldwide love these comfort movies, and that’s totally fine.
At the end of Kinda Pregnant, I became encouraged to revise this list and add a few more limits to preserve the little sanity I have left and the terrible night of sleep that preceded watching this horrific “picture” that was neither funny nor nourishing for my mind and body. Netflix was already on a tightrope with all the garbage they continue to release, especially in the wake of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez. However, even that terrible movie had some slight redeeming qualities. Kinda Pregnant is built on anti-redeeming qualities, which haven’t been experienced by myself in a very long time. As a result, I’ve added two more limits in the hopes that my adventures in moviegoing will significantly improve in the years to come: No more Amy Schumer. And no more Tyler Spindel. Society has moved past their need to continue torturing us like this. Enough is enough.