Baby Mama

The fun-filled yet poignant romp that is Baby Mama is never diluted or messed up. Here's a winner from start to finish.

It's a perfectly bred combination of razor-sharp satire and female buddy comedy.

Fey and Poehler are terrific together, their relationship the heart of the film.

The supporting cast makes a strong backup for Poelher and Fey as they try to forge this most unusual relationship. In the end, Baby Mama really delivers.

The movie's hook is the rapport between its two stars. They turn a classical screwball relationship upside down.

The material stays conventional and superficial, if a notch above the obvious, and writer-director Michael McCullers has a flair for cutting scenes before they plunge toward too-easy laughs.

The only reason it works as well as it does -- or that it even works at all -- is because of its star, former SNL head writer Tina Fey, who's really turning into an endearing comic performer.

A warm and engaging comedy you are guaranteed to fall in love with thanks to the inspired odd coupling of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. These Baby Mamas are red hot.

The surrogacy plotline is merely a vehicle for bun-in-the-oven humor, culture-clash jokes and reproductive-anatomy punchlines.

On the evidence of their performances, Fey and Poehler are positioning themselves to become the next Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy of movie comedy.

Sometimes the side dishes are tastier than the entree, in comedy as well as cuisine, which is the case with Baby Mama.

Usually, talk of infants, romance and two female leads won't appeal to the male demographic. Setting the testosterone aside, though, this one is too funny to be counted out.

What makes Baby Mama worth the ride is watching the performers when they untether from the plot.

Baby Mama doesn't come on too strong, like so many overpowering so-called comedies. It comes on real, then gets really funny.

Baby Mama ultimately gives in to sweetness, but it has some deliciously tart moments along the way.

It's like The Odd Couple -- but with morning-sickness jokes. Luckily for Baby Mama, and for us, they're pretty good morning-sickness jokes.

Not surprisingly, given how well they worked together on Saturday Night Live, Fey and Poehler are a great team.

McCullers came up with a perfect scenario for Fey and Poehler, a true comedy team who honed their chemistry over multiple seasons worth of Weekend Updates.

Don't be put off by the uninspired commercials and skit-like movie trailer. This is a charming light comedy, enhanced by the chemistry between SNL mates Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

It's more like a big-screen sitcom than a feature movie, with cardboard-cutout characters reacting to a checklist of clichéd set-ups and stereotypical scenes.

Baby Mama, a teeteringly uneven comedy, isn't much of a conversation starter.

Fey and Poehler, a winning combination on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, demonstrate a similar broad chemistry in Baby Mama.

The sight of pregnant bellies in modern comedies is so tired right now and there are other elements of the film that we've seen too many times before.

I found Baby Mama mildly funny, but I might have found it hysterical if it were a Tina Fey movie instead of a movie with Tina Fey in it.

Though imperfectly cast as the young, semi-literate, child-bearing type, Poehler brings her substantial comic focus to bear on Angie, and owns the role.

McCullers has penned a comedy in which hypocrisy and ethical unsteadiness get teased, not lambasted.

Baby Mama is an endearing but exasperating exercise in fertility, a sort of Sisterhood of the Traveling Uterus, that strikes too many false notes to seem anything but too familiar.

With virtually nothing in the way of visual or physical comedy, there are more chuckles here than belly laughs, and most of them are delivered by the supporting cast.

Baby Mama offers a few surprises, some giggles and just enough belly laughs to deliver a bouncy baby movie.

In the end, well, things are lot tidier than a toddler's room, but it's a lot like childbirth, too. You forget the bad parts and feel really good.

There are no classic sequences and scarcely any quotable lines. Baby Mama is no miscarriage, but it's hardly a bundle of joy.

Pregnant with possibility yet laboured in its delivery, Baby Mama is a distaff knock-off of the much funnier Knocked Up.

What's conceived on-screen is an amiable comedy that's clever yet conventional, perceptive but predictable and never the laugh-out-loud farce that I wanted it to be.

Baby Mama doesn't have a plot so much as a series of contrivances that play out completely as expected.

The film is so frequently uninspired, contrived, predictable and disappointing you lose faith in it halfway through.

The plodding script and the plot twists tossed in at predictable intervals don't help.

With a surer hand or a sharper eye, this biological-clock comedy might have delivered bigger laughs. But the formula is sufficiently warmed by godmothers Tina Fey and Amy Poehler that the movie coughs up some chuckles

Fey isn't listed here as a writer, and though one assumes she contributed bits of dialogue, it wasn't enough to make the film anything other than a pleasant, predictable fairy tale about modern life.

Baby Mama’s predictable story arc and gooey centre don’t leave much room for the wingnuttiness that reigns supreme at Fey’s day job.

The film is on some level a disappointment, if only because Fey and Poehler seem to have taken something of a backseat in the scripting of this domestic comedy of errors.

That the plot is pure formula scarcely matters. This film lives and dies on the actors' timing and the situations' ingenuity.

Better than an extended Saturday Night Live episode but not hilarious or emotional enough to count as a total movie.

Baby Mama is a pleasantly predictable new wrinkle on the "moving to the mommy track" comedy.

The film feels shakier and maybe emptier than your typical successful high-concept comedy.

It's not that Baby Mama is an outright bad movie. It's just so thoroughly typical, a one-note, odd-couple, laff-lite film featuring two Saturday Night Live veterans that reminds you of so many other dashed-together SNL vet films.

Baby Mama, I'm sad to say, is just sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk.

Every moment of this project feels beat-driven, focus-grouped and designed to package Fey as a viable movie star.

Fey is the main reason to see Baby Mama, a film from the Saturday Night Live crowd that pairs her with Amy Poehler for a comedy about motherhood. Too bad Fey spends most of her time playing straight man.

Baby Mama is just amusing enough to provoke a few chuckles and just short enough to keep you from glancing at your watch.

What may be the first real outsourcing comedy, Baby Mama is like a pacifier: floppy, nourishment-free and may even keep your teeth from growing in straight.

Baby Mama contorts itself into some slapstick social commentary, about the clash between working-class and professional-class mores.

The choice gets made time and again to aim not for the high road but for the great, big, fat, juicy, unchallenging, uncontroversial middle ground, where everybody’s laughing but nothing is all that funny.

As satires go, Baby Mama can't even sprout teeth. Instead it gums the jugular.

Baby Mama is more apt to make you smile politely instead of laugh uproariously.

This is a film about being pregnant, aimed squarely at women who either are, have been recently, or desperately want to be. Keep those expectations in check.

Baby Mama is recycled material that has not only been done before on countless television shows, but it also has been done better.

An exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects.

Two things you should know about the comedy Baby Mama: The funniest parts were in the trailers, and the trailers weren't that funny.

This snoozer from Michael McCullers (scribe of all three Austin Powers movies) is as pedestrian and middling as they come.