Movie Review: 'Kinda Pregnant' is a Deeply Unfunny Comedy

Kinda Pregnant

Directed by Tyler Spindel

Written by Julie Palva, Amy Schumer

Starring Amy Schumer, Brianna Howey, Jillian Bell, Will Forte, Damon Wayans Jr.

Release Date February 5th, 2025

Published February 11th, 2025

Because it has become quite fashionable for men to hate Amy Schumer ever since she rocketed to fame on Comedy Central and in the movie, Trainwreck, I need to say that I’ve always liked her. Despite the accusations of joke theft and a couple of movies that didn’t play to her best assets comedically, I’ve always found her style of comedy appealing. She’s irreverent, she never held back on stage, and as an actor, she had an offbeat style that made her unique from the typical movie star.

I am mentioning all of this to head off any notion that I am an Amy Schumer hater. It’s not me trying to be part of the cool crowd when I say that Schumer’s new Netflix comedy, Kinda Pregnant is a deeply odd and wildly unpleasant film. The movie, co-written by Schumer, stars the comedian and actress as a deeply unlikable and unreal caricature of a human being. She has traits that are intended to be broadly comic but come off as unformed ideas tossed off in a pitch meeting that accidentally ended up in a completed script.

Kinda Pregnant stars Amy Schumer as Lainey, a woman who has dreamed of getting pregnant since she was a child. It doesn’t appear to be a strong desire to be a mother but rather a bizarre fetish for being pregnant and giving birth, an act she and her closest childhood friend, Kate (Jillian Bell), used to act out on the playground as no child has ever done. It’s a forced and weird choice to have a scene where two children act out giving birth with a Cabbage Patch doll, lingering on the details of the pain, sweat, and tears that go into actually giving birth.

Cut to adult Lainey and Kate now working as teachers at a New York City school. Lainey believes that her boyfriend, Dave (Damon Wayans Jr) is about to ask her to marry him. The unfunny twist is that after they’ve been in a relationship long enough to warrant talking about marriage, Dave takes Lainey to dinner, pulls out what looks like a ring box and proposes… a threesome with the other woman he’s begun seeing behind her back. Lainey rejects the proposal and leaves heartbroken. No laughs are found in this needless sequence.

Lainey’s sad state is exacerbated when Kate reluctantly admits that she’s pregnant. This sends Lainey into a bit of a spiral and while she puts on the brave face of being a supportive best friend, her jealousy leads her to purchase a fake pregnancy belly and walk the streets of New York basking in the attention she gets as a pregnant woman. Lainey finds great pleasure in simple things like getting a man to give up a seat on a subway or getting complimented for her pregnancy ‘glow.’ Naturally, this is all building to Lainey getting caught but not before that she meets a new friend, Megan (Brianna Howey), and a new love interest, Josh (Will Forte), who both believe that she’s pregnant.

From that plot description Kinda Pregnant sounds like a forgettable farce, a simple and familiar premise that comes and goes quickly and doesn’t leave much of an impression. If only that were what Kinda Pregnant was. Sadly, as it is, Kinda Pregnant isn't forgettable, it's an unendurable slog. Watching Kinda Pregnant, I was overcome with a feeling of secondhand embarrassment for everyone in the movie, a feeling that was so deep and agonizing I wanted to turn the movie off. Indeed, I did not make it through the movie in one sitting, I had to watch it over a period of a few days just to get through it.

Normally reliable for being weird in an offbeat but charming way, Amy Schumer creates a character in Lainey who is weird to an off-putting degree. There is the whole pregnancy obsession which comes off as a fetish as much as it is a desire. Then there is her relationship to literally every other character in the movie, none of which feels authentic or achieves any kind of relatable reality.

It’s as if Lainey was a sketch performer dropped into real life scenarios and forced to riff her way to something funny to say or do. Imagine an Impractical Jokers prank that goes on for nearly 100 minutes with no laugh track and no one giving funny prompts to set up the jokes, just one stuttering oddball trying and failing to convince people she isn't performing some elaborate and unfunny sketch/prank.

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