Review of 'Knocked Up'

If you liked 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' (and plenty of people did) then you know what you’re in for with writer/director Jude Apatow’s second feature Knocked Up. It’s the dialogue-based Hollywood world of likeable losers and toilet-bowl humour, sprinkled through liberally with middle-American honesty and grunge-free freshness. If this were food, it would be in a box in nice convenient bite-sized pieces. Nothing difficult to chew on, please!

The film opens like a screwball comedy, with classy, stunning, career-minded Alison (Katherine Heigl) finding herself in an unlikely one-night stand with an overweight, unemployed, wise-cracking, dopehead called Ben (Seth Rogen). The film’s poster says it all – “what if this guy got you pregnant?” Of course he does, and having made Ben so un-cool and so, so unwantable, Apatow has to work hard for the rest of the film to make us – and Alison - like him. We follow their pregnancy from start to finish and, when the main story flags – which it does often in the second half – we fall back on the sub-cultural lives of Ben’s pot-smoking porn buddies, and the more conventional, but no less happy lives of Alison’s sister and brother-in-law, (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd) with whom she lives.

The first half of the film is quite different to the second, as the often very clever and sometimes gross humour of the set-up gives way to the more sentimental and sober business of heading towards the delivery room. As the foetus grows and develops, the chasm between Alison and Ben, revealed (along with Ben’s butt size) on the morning after, is steadily closed with the aid of lashings of sentimental music and a few warm words from Ben’s Dad (Harold Ramis). Do we believe it? Probably not, but by the time the closing credits hit, we’re in deep sloppy, newborn baby slush - in a different film from where we started - but almost certainly feeling warm and gooey.

This is an overly long, formula-driven sit-com on steriods that bumps steadily from scene to scene, some irrelevant, some excellent. The performances throughout are strongly focused around delivery of the comic dialogue with a dry ironic nonchalance, at the expense of any deeper characterisation. Alison and Ben are a very unlikely pair and ultimately Stone and Heigl don’t really have the depth to make us feel that they could fall for each other or make their relationship work in the long term. But with a newborn delivered right in front of you, you’re not meant to worry about this kind of detail.