Knocked Up

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by watching Transformers twice in a week, but this free preview was one of those where at the end you think ‘That wasn’t worth it.’

The premise of the film – intelligent TV presenter gets knocked up after a one night stand with a weed-smoking goofball, decides to keep the baby and along the way falls in love with said goofball – offers fewer laughs than you’d expect. Unless you’re the kind of person who finds cinematic depictions of people getting high an absolute riot. In which case, you’re in luck as the stoners seems to get stoned every couple of minutes.

The problems with this movie are manifold. Firstly there’s the knowing references to other films. One minute you see a poster for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, the next, two main characters decide to go to Las Vegas and eat magic mushrooms. That’s one of the subtler references.

Then there’s the wider cast and sub-plots involving the other characters. Most of them could have been dispensed with to make this a tighter storyline. The first half an hour is excruciatingly dull. Distil it into five minutes and the film would still be forty minutes or so too long. A script editor would have helped, especially one with a bigger vocabulary. Profanities in movies don't usually bother me, unless they become tiresome in their regularity.

The two leads, played by Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl are quite good, but only Paul Rudd, who seems to have lost a few pounds since he romanced Phoebe in the last series of Friends, emerged with any real credit from the wider cast, although the kids playing his daughters were funny. The birth scene at the end is believable and explicit – and is credibly acted (and scarily horrible). But it takes a helluva long time to get there.

There ain't much of a moral to this story, except maybe 'don't have sex when you're drunk, and if you do, try to remember to use a condom'. Oh, and 'never walk into a room where a woman is giving birth, even if they are screaming.' But apart from that, the bigger lesson to be learned from Knocked Up is how not to do a movie.

Jongudmund’s verdict: Wait for it to appear on telly, but I bet you’ll switch channels halfway through. 4/10.