By A little bit of preamble if you will:
I like Mark Brendanawicz Paul Schneider. Sure he disappeared after two seasons of Parks & Recreation, but his short time there was enjoyable. I also like Olivia Munn because … well … she’s very pretty and isn’t half bad on The Newsroom. Also she MS Paints dirty talk onto her naughty pics, and I admire the effort.
Most of all, I like the Broken Lizard guys. Despite the fact that there’s always a crappy movie (Club Dread, The Slammin’ Salmon) sandwiched between their great movies (Super Troopers, Beerfest), the strength of their good movies have been enough to instill some faith into those guys. With the addition of Jay Chandrasekhar having his hand in some great comedy properties (Community, Arrested Development, Happy Endings), it has become one of those things where the name itself invokes some excitement and joy in me.
Now, with all those factors working together … how the hell did we get this aborted fetus of a movie?
The Babymakers
Director: Jay Chandrasekhar
Rating: R
Release Date: August 3, 2012
Tommy (Paul Schenider) and Aubrey (Olivia Munn) are trying to have a baby, but after many futile attempts they go to a doctor and find out that Tommy has “confused” sperm due to testicular trauma over the years. With his pride as a manly man on the line, Tommy hatches a plan with his best friend Wade (Kevin Heffernan) and a former indian mafioso Ron Jon (Jay Chandrasekhar) to rob the sperm bank he donated his sperm to years ago. Hijinks ensue.
Now to be fair, The Babymakers isn’t technically a Broken Lizard film as it was written by Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow and only stars two of the Broken Lizard ensemble. But with Chandrasekhar at the helm and other Broken Lizard staples passing through, it’s very much in the spirit of the frat boy humor associated with the troupe. With The Babymakers, however, the humor is not only very stilted and predictable, but downright infantile.
While infantile can work, paired with stereotypical characters it makes for a vacuum of joy. We’ve got your horny fat friend, the ex boyfriend who still wants to have sex with your wife, the black friend who points out that he’s the only black person … and all of that’d tolerable considering these are all secondary characters. What hurts, however, is our main character is kind of an arrogant prick. Paul Schneider, for the most part, is downright unlikeable. What hurts most, however, is the fact that Jay Chandrasekhar has resorted to playing a borderline racist indian character with a thick accent. That may not sound to bad, but I’m talking “thank you berry much” levels of minstrel. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that Chandrasekhar would always play a character who happened to be brown, but now that he’s played a character whose whole trait is the fact that he’s brown kind of ruins it for me.
As for the “jizz heist” itself … sigh. Everything leading up to the heist is slapped together haphazardly to the point it becomes a clusterf*ck of unbelievable circumstances. Things are picked up, dropped, and quickly resolved so often that it becomes painfully obvious that they are just buying time until the “jizz heist” and by the time that happens all it is is a couple of idiots running in and out of rooms and spilling goo all over the place.
In the end, The Babymakers is a sloppy infantile comedy peppered in with dick/spunk jokes. It’s bland, forced, and in a sense sad. I wanted to like this film off of the strength of the Broken Lizard affiliation, but in all it wasn’t enough to save this easy attempt at humor.