Baby Mama
Director: Michael McCullers
Writer: Michael McCullers
Cast: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco, Sigourney Weaver, Steve Martin, Maura Tierney, Holland Taylor, Denis O’Hare, Will Forte, Fred Armisen, John Hodgman, Jason Mantzoukas
Seen on: 18./19.7.2026

Content Note: a whole lot of problematic jokes, I don’t even remember what exactly, but definitely fatmisia, sexism and probably transmisia

Plot:
Kate (Tina Fey) has a great career, money, a nice apartment and no social life to speak of. When she decides to not wait for Mr Right bur to have a baby on her own, she finds out that she can’t: she is infertile. Despite some trepidations, she hires the services of Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver) to find a surrogate mom. Enter Angie (Amy Poehler): young, strapped for cash and fertile, she is ready to give birth to Kate’s baby. But things get very complicated with Angie.

Baby Mama was a pretty horrible film. Do not get sucked in by the cast like I did. It doesn’t really have anything to offer.

I was in the mood for something low-brow and fun when I turned on Baby Mama with a little trepidation: I love Parks and Recreation and therefore Poehler has a soft spot in my heart, but I couldn’t get into 30 Rock, and I know that Poehler and Fey together are usually more on the 30 Rock side of things. This is just to say that I didn’t expect much from the film but I had some hope for it.

I shouldn’t have. Baby Mama is everything I feared it would be. Piggybacking on feminist rhetoric, it somehow ends up as sexist and heteronormative as a movie can be, and it is not even funny as it goes along its supposedly merry way. The one thing I might credit them with in a feminist sense is that for once, we get a movie with two female leads who are both allowed to be as immature and unlikeable as usually only male leads get to be in comedies like The Hangover and whatnot. But I don’t really like it any more when it is the women doing it.

Oh, hang on, I can give it a second credit because Amy Poehler is obviously supposed to play a character that is about 15 to 20 years younger than she is and that is also something extraordinary for a female character (unless they are playing a high-schooler).

But that’s about it. Everything else about the film is trite, shallow, and tired, if not outright offensive. It goes exactly as you’d expect it to, including a quasi magical ending (because we couldn’t suffer a woman to be acutally infertile, could we). I don’t know why I finished watching it.

Summarizing: no, thank you.