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Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) is living the high life with his slacker buddies (Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Martin Starr). Sharing a California home, the fivesome smoke weed and reenact American Gladiators in-between working on a new website that isn’t exactly porn according to Ben. Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) is a production assistant at the E! network and she’s about to get her big break interviewing celebs on camera. One night at a club, the two meet, get drunk and have condom-free sex thanks to a semantic misinterpretation. Alison isn’t exactly regret-free in the morning and, after a forgetful breakfast, the two don’t see each other for the next eight weeks.

Then comes the morning sickness and decisions have to be made. Alison tracks Ben down who reacts poorly to the news at first, but after seeking out his dad (Harold Ramis) for counsel, he commits to seeing Alison through the pregnancy. Her sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), a parent of two herself, doesn’t have a lot of faith in Ben who strikes up a friendship with her hubby, Pete (Paul Rudd), who is suffering the downsides to freedom that comes with the responsibility of fatherhood.

You may be asking yourself why you need to see another child birthing film after cinema’s baby boom era of 1987 (Three Men and a Baby, Baby Boom), 1988 (For Keeps, She’s Having a Baby), 1989 (Look Who’s Talking, Parenthood) or even Chris Columbus’ 1995 entry to the genre, Nine Months. We can start on the pure laugh quotient alone and work around that; not that they leave us much time in-between what will be an engulfment of laughter from audiences. And God Bless Them!

Apatow knows precisely how to cast his projects and it helps when a little loyalty goes a long way. Ben’s household is a virtual reunion of Apatow’s terrific and unheraldly cancelled shows, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Jason Segel gets more laughs in his scenes with this material than a full season-and-a-half of the dreadful How I Met Your Mother. Jonah Hill (the eBay boot buyer from 40 Year-Old Virgin) and Baruchel (the star of Undeclared) each get their big laughs in and Martin Starr (virtually unrecognizable as once the biggest Geek amongst the Freaks) is the good sport as the constant butt of the film’s best running gag.

Leslie Mann (aka Mrs. Apatow) received an immediate pass into the modern comedy hall-of-fame with her drunken “frennnnnch toast” drive in Virgin. Ben’s monetary supplement may even be a nod to Mann’s appearance as the ex-Hooter’s girl in Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. But even though she plays the suspicious shrew of the film, she’s given a fully-rounded character that comes full circle outside a club when she realizes the constraints of family have caught up with her as well. Paul Rudd (aka arguably the funniest man on the planet) at first remains firmly in the background as Mann’s confined hubby but then finds new life inspired by Ben’s free-living attitude. And when he does, Rudd doubles the frequency of the laughs through his arcane observations and his almost otherworldly ability to know just how long to take a pregnant pause.

Rogen, an Apatow veteran of both TV shows and his breakout turn in Virgin, solidifies his place amongst the best of the current crop of comedic actors. He can deliver a comeback almost as fast as his droll observations of any room he’s placed within and that makes him a supporting player you’d kill to have in the frame. But he’s the lead here and Rogen doesn’t succumb to just mugging his way through improvisations hoping the laughter will drown out a lack of dramatic depth. This is a very good performance that teeters the various sexes of the audience to questions of his sincerity, maturity and ability to take charge when he self-consciously knows he’s not an alpha male. It’s the little confessional moments of his own insecurities that humanize Rogen’s Ben and make his courtship of the “prettier” Alison more endearing to the most superficial of observers. Heigl may not get a lot of the bigger laughs thrown the way of the males in the film, but she has a much tougher job in selling the relationship. Alison and Ben are in no way the ideal couple and when they click, it’s the result of finding a mutually common ground that the other can get along with. And when they fight, it doesn’t feel like a plot necessity. Their words contain the harsh tone of truth and frustration that both men and women will find themselves identifying with, even if its with the opposite sex.

Aside from the brilliant subtle bits that Apatow works into the screenplay (consider the understated contrast between Ben’s website and Alison’s celebrity day job), Knocked Up is near non-stop on the giant laughs from minute one to minute one-thirty-four. That’s right. Including the credits (which you’ll probably be laughing for five minutes just recalling the film), Knocked Up runs 130-plus minutes. The knee-jerk reaction is to scorn a comedy that runs on that long, but how can you when the film justifies the running time by delivering whiplash comedy complemented by astute examination of behavioral instincts from the various sexes, status and classes that most dramas need remedial courses to recognize? When Ryan Seacrest is able to hysterically poke needles into the pot-o’-luck he’s fallen into and leaves audiences giving him his props for it, something special is clearly happening. And if Seacrest is getting a shout-out then I also have to give it up for Kristen Wiig from SNL who steals her scenes as Heigl’s colleague, Charlyne Yi as another stoned roommate whose line readings are so giddily off-step it provokes instant laughs, Ken Jeong as an attentively insensitive gynecologist and Craig Robinson (from TV's The Office) as a bouncer who lays out his job requirements in a hysterical monologue.

Before you go into Knocked Up, every serious movie fan should make up a list of their favorite comedies of the past two decades. If Old School is on it, you are disqualified. But no matter what is, scratch one off of it – because Knocked Up is going to knock it off eventually and its earned the spot.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15742&reviewer=198
originally posted: 03/22/07 02:39:03
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