


It seem unfair that Amy Schumer‘s moment as America’s resident vulgarian and Queen of Crude has passed.
We barely remember she was the Oscars hostess the night Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, that “Trainwreck” came out ten years ago and that the indifferent projects she’s made since — with breaks in between — did not move the pop culture needle the way the earliest days of “Inside Amy Schumer” did.
“Kinda Pregnant” is an Amy Schumer comedy that so perfectly lines up with her persona and recent life experiences that you’d swear you’d seen it before., on TV if not on the big screen.
But no, our “Life & Beth” star never played an uncensored New York middle school teacher who fakes a pregnancy. No, Will Forte’s never played her leading man. That was Bill Hader. And Michael Cera.
With Kardashian jokes, emasculating “Jada’s Red Table” podcast and Old Navy plugs and an ABBA moment, “Pregnant” is so dated it’s practically dusty.
A comedy about craving motherhood so hard you fall into cosplaying pregnancy, the film pushes a few buttons when it entangles itself in choice and abortion and threesomes and a teacher starting a fire in her classroom. Aside from that, the Happy Madison Productions logo at the outset says it all. It’s where Adam Sandler’s production company finds a home for himself and his mostly played-out generation of screen comics — Netflix.
Schumer and Jillian Bell play Lainy and Kate, childhood besties who grew up without mothers. Lainy was the one who took that experience as motivation.
“Being a mom is the single greatest thing a human being can do.”
But when her faithless lover (Damon Wayans Jr.) takes her to dinner on their fourth (dating) anniversary, he’s ready to propose “a threesome,” not marriage. And then Kate gets pregnant, throwing Lainy into a tizzy of jealousy.
Motherhood was HER destiny.
As their nemesis/colleague at Clinton Hill Middle School, the skinny, tartly-attired Shirley (Lizze Broadway) is also pregnant, Lainy finds herself the odd woman out, with only the bawdy, vaping cynic of a thick-accented guidance counselor to hang with.
South African New Zealander Urzila Carlson plays guidance counselor Fallon, as almost nobody wants to work with Rebel Wilson any more.
But a visit to a maternity shop gives Lainy the idea that with a fake baby bump, she can experience much of what her friend and others go through, even if it’s just to strangers.
New Yorkers become supportive, kind and solicitous, and not just on the subway. She even meets a fellow mom, Megan (Brianne Howey) she clicks with at a prenatal yoga class.
And it’s through Megan that Lainy — passing herself off as “Sasha Fierce” in this alter ego — meets zamboni driver Josh (Forte). Might the Anne Sexton-loving, Shakespeare-worshipping English teacher rediscover romance with a guy who smoothes over skating rinks for a living?
Schumer, who co-wrote the script, serves up an amusingly flatulent “mamaste” yoga class and some crude, sexually frank truths for Lainy to pass on to her middle school students.
The “Your skin is GLOWING” montage of street encounters and complimentary subway riders is cute and just edgy enough.
But the picture has little funny for Bell, Howey, Wayans or Forte to play or say. The plot makes little hay with the “two separate lives” gimmick of Lainy’s two identities, pregnant and not pregnant.
And possibilities are squandered when Schumer under-thinks and over-engineers a sex scene with a guy Lainy can’t allow to figure out she’s not pregnant.
Broadway and Carlson are the stand-outs in the supporting cast — one riffing in Oz slang and the other vamping her teacher/aspiring pole dancer up.
With little of Schumer’s go-to “Oh no she DIDN’T” shock value in even the amusing moms-with-gas and watch-where-you-point-that-zamboni moments, the final verdict on “Kinda Pregnant” is kind of tired and kind of played, with a star who needs to find some new shtick if she’s to have another cultural moment all her own.
Rating: R, sex, profanity, some drug use and crude humor
Cast: Amy Schumer, Will Forte, Jillian Bell, Brianne Howey, Lizze Broadway, Urzila Carlson, Alex Moffat and Damon Wayans Jr.
Credits:Directed by Tyler Spindel, scripted by Julie Paiva and Amy Schumer. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:37

