Knocked Up

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

It’s not the most pleasant of situations, and is often seen as a mistake or a horrible accident. However, accidental pregnancies have been around since the dawn of time and will probably continue to happen until the end of time. Still, if the some of the guys who brought us “The 40-Year Old Virgin” could make a comedy movie about this stressful predicament, it had the chance to be funny, right?

Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) is a slacker, stoner, and porno-lover. That sentence alone should get most guys to love him. Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) is a production assistant on E! Television who suddenly gets to be an interviewer. Just as her career is on the rise, Alison and Ben get hammered and have a one night stand. Eight weeks later, Alison finds out she’s pregnant and their lives are about to change forever. What follows is an attempt by these two seemingly polar opposites to try and make a relationship for themselves in light of the baby that they’re about to have.

Director Judd Apatow has done two of my favorite comedies of all time: “40-Year Old” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.” Whereas those two films had huge laugh out loud moments for me, scenes that literally had me grabbing my stomach due to laughter, “Knocked Up” completely lacked those. I don’t know if the premise of a Katherine Heigl actually falling for a Seth Rogen is just so incomprehensible to me, but I believe it’s more of an unimaginative and relatively unfunny script that kept this movie from being a great comedy. The dialogue was alright, but nothing crisp or really, really funny.

Maybe it was the seriousness of the situation that removed the funny from this flick. I mean, it’s okay to see Ben and his stoner friends smoking their bongs and peddling porn for a while, but it also got old relatively fast. It was funny when Ben and Alison tried having sex while she was already pregnant, but it still lacked an extra dose to get me laughing. In the end, maybe Apatow, Rogen, and company also wanted to tell a story about gaining maturity and taking responsibility for one’s actions. Seriously, who wants to see maturity and responsibility in a comedy? Not me!

Overall, “Knocked Up” wasn’t a bad film, it just wasn’t a great film either. Considering the track record of the director, writers, and actors, that’s quite disappointing. But hey, it’s not like it was ever shown on the big screen in the Philippines anyway. You gotta love free downloads.