A rom-com for a change this week. What is it with all these pregnancy movies? When did it become cool?

It's all Brangelina's fault, I think.

Successful single businesswoman Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is 37. After years of putting her career ahead of a personal life, her biological clock is ticking. Loudly. Undeterred by not having a partner in her life, she sets out to get pregnant, only to find she has a T-shaped uterus with a million to one chance of falling pregnant.

 Undaunted, the driven Kate hires Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler) to become her surrogate. Supported by Angie’s boyfriend, Carl (Dax Shepherd) the eggs are implanted and a pregnancy ensues. But there is trouble in Angie’s life and after she discovers Carl has been unfaithful to her, she moves out and lands on Kate’s doorstep.

Baby Mama then becomes a sort of Odd Couple for the new millennium, with the added twist of a surrogacy thrown in. Fey and Poehler are great together as the uptight Kate and the laid-back, working class Angie, struggling to get along for the sake of the unborn child they share. 

The supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear as the affable small businessman who wins Kate’s corporate heart, and Sigourney Weaver as the owner of the surrogacy agency who inexplicably keeps having more and more children of her own, despite her advanced age. The best role, however, is saved for Steve Martin, who stars as Kate’s millionaire hippy boss, whose rewards for a stitching up a great deal include five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact. 

The film is amusing, although predictable. The Odd Couple scenario is hardly groundbreaking stuff, but the cast is competent and believable and there are enough laughs to keep the audience entertained, including an ending so obvious you knew in the first five minutes of this film, how it was going to end. Written and directed by Michael McCullers (who also wrote Thunderbirds and Austin Powers: Goldmember) it lacks the satirical edge of the Austin Powers movies, erring on the side of safe and comfortable, rather than threatening any mainstream family values. 

In fact, what I found most interesting — and ultimately irritating — about this film, was not that it was about surrogacy, but that it shied away from anything remotely smacking of controversy, which was a bit of a let down in the end, even though, as I said, you could see the ending coming before the opening credits had faded.