What is it about Tina Fey that makes me want to see a dozen more features starring her? She has a charm about her that has transferred from Saturday Night Live over to 30 Rock and now Baby Mama, an unremarkable comedy that has some fleeting funny moments, a fairly easy-going pace, and a hilarious supporting turn by the recently MIA Steve Martin. The film is definitely a quick, fun watch, and there’s not a lot that’s necessarily bad about it. However, anybody who gets this cast together for a potentially very funny premise should’ve made a much better movie than what we get here.

2007 marked the trilogy of the pregnancy comedies. Waitress, Knocked Up, and Juno weren’t perfect movies but they all worked very well in their own quirky ways. All were, of course, flawed as well. Baby Mama isn’t nearly as successful as any of those three movies, but it works fine nonetheless, with the story of a woman who can’t get pregnant and therefore hires a surrogate to harvest and deliver her child. I don’t know what it is about mainstream comedies dealing with pregnancies that can be so entertaining. They’re probably not the most difficult of films to write since there is a nine-month time line already set out before a word of the screenplay gets written. You know what the first act will entail (getting pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or discovering a pregnancy), and the third act will have that baby being born. It’s a routine, masked by creativity (hopefully) by whomever is doing the writing.

A personal favorite pregnancy comedy of mine is Father of the Bride, Part II. I don’t know what it is about this movie, which some may consider throw-away mainstream entertainment, but every time it’s on television I’ll watch the whole thing and laugh my head off. Steve Martin is absolutely wonderful in the movie, and any pregnancy comedy that features him in the cast is well worth seeing. Color me surprised when I learned around mid-April that Martin was in Baby Mama. I didn’t even know! He plays a weird, hippie-like New Age boss of Tina Fey (Kate) who likes to sit on tables and stare into people’s eyes for five minutes at a time. Martin hasn’t been in a film in over two years, so it was welcome to see him again. Is he done with film acting (this side of the Pink Panther movies)? I’ve missed him a lot.

The whole cast in Baby Mama is pretty stellar, with Fey, Martin, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Maura Tierney, and Sigourney Weaver all in the mix. I personally prefer Weaver in more broad comedies than serious dramas (Galaxy Quest remains an all-time favorite), and she lights up the screen in a handful of funny scenes. An on-going joke with her constantly being pregnant could’ve fallen flat, but somehow she makes the repetitive joke work. The first moment where we see her, and she laughs and laughs and laughs, is so over-the-top that we know we can’t take this film too seriously. But that’s part of the fun. Amy Poehler, who I usually find annoying and sometimes unwatchable on Saturday Night Live, actually didn’t cause me too much harm in this film. She plays an annoying character, but the way Poehler and Fey play off each other make for an amusing relationship that makes her more tolerable but still warrants a better movie.

There are plenty of scenes in the film that go by that offer little in the way of originality and even less in the way of laughs. Writer/director Michael McCullers, who co-wrote the second and third Austin Powers movies, obviously is on the right track to comedy gold, but he doesn’t go far enough. Everything feels too safe. The movie could’ve pushed jokes further. And the plot could’ve taken a few less obvious turns, especially the last one that you can see coming right from the initial early scenes. Most of all, I wanted to laugh more. There was enjoyment to be had, but not really any big laughs. The only time I really laughed was during the Steve Martin scenes and some of the Sigourney Weaver material. Most of the scenes with Fey and Poehler are watchable but not exciting by any means.

Baby Mama is more of a rental but is worth watching once. Tina Fey is bound for bigger and better roles on the screen, and here’s hoping this is the beginning of what could be an interesting film career. I know her strengths are comedy writing and acting on 30 Rock, but I hope she flexes her acting muscles more on the screen soon. I also welcomed seeing Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver, as their screen presence is always well appreciated. Could this mark the end of pregnancy comedies for awhile? I would say not. With the huge success of Knocked Up and Juno, and the marginal success of this film, I can imagine they have only just begun.