Baby Mama

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Director: Michael McCullers

Stars: Amy Poehler, Dax Shepard, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Greg Kinnear

Year: 2008 Running Time: 99 mins Rating:

Tina Fey is the corporate high-flier who discovers - at 37 - that she wants to have a baby. When she finds out that it's a biological non-starter, she turns to surrogate-mum-for-hire Amy Poehler to act as a host for her eggs. Not a good choice. Fey ably steps to lead actress status while Poehler seizes the opportunity to play a white trash waster with gusto. It's also the first time that Steve Martin - as a capitalist hippy - has been funny in quite a while.

Review

Every tick of the biological clock echoes reprovingly in the brain of health food empire vice president Kate Holbrook (Fey).

At 37, she's at the wrong end of the parental age range...and counting. She's also unmarried with no prospects of snaring a co-parent on the horizon.

After drawing a blank with artificial insemination, she's informed by a fertility specialist that she's got a "t-shaped uterus" which leaves her a one-in-a-million-chance of getting pregnant.

Undeterred, she engages the services of Sigourney Weaver's surrogacy centre where - at $100,000 a pop - "it costs more to have someone born than it does to have someone killed"

Despite the six-figure price tag, Kate is offered the dubious services of trailer trash surrogate Angie (Poehler), a blonde good-time girl whose idea of health food is a Big Mac sluiced down with Gatorade.

Director Michael McCullers, who helmed Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, cradles similar territory to Judd Apatow's Knocked Up.

Fey and Poehler are class comedy actresses and a bright spot is Steve Martin in his first decent comedy performance in an age as Kate's ponytailed corporate hippy boss who revels in all sorts of nonsensical new age pronouncements.

Ultimately, it distinguishes itself from other (baby) formula. Put it this way, it's a lot better than Maybe Baby.

Tim Evans