I am pissed at Lindsay Lohan. If she hadn't so epically screwed up her life/career, the fact that her latest movie went straight to TV wouldn't be newsworthy and I wouldn't have had to watch crappy Labor Pains. If this was just a standard mediocre TV movie with bad dubbing, sloppy editing, a low-profile lead and a dumb storyline, it wouldn't make a sound in the proverbial forest and fewer people would have wasted their time.
But, since it's a symbol of how far Lohan's career has fallen since Mean Girls (a very enjoyable movie to be sure, but let's get real, it wasn't Sophie's Choice), the movie's non-theatrical release became news and so it's receiving coverage for how bad/cheap the film is.
Labor Pains isn't enjoyably bad by any stretch (it's almost easier, it seems, to make a decent movie than a good-bad one) but other than a well-stacked cast (including Cheryl Hines, Chris Parnell and Janeane Garofalo), it doesn't have anything good going for it either.
To be fair, it really isn't Lohan's fault. She certainly doesn't give much of a performance—she lacks any energy or freshness or even a sense of dizzy charm that someone approximating an Amy Adams or Drew Barrymore could muster. But the movie around her is a stinker. It's pretty much summed up by the Chinese Crested (i.e. funny-looking) dog throwing up (with fascinatingly clumsy special effects) on Chris Parnell—a scene made sadder by how predictable it is.
The plot itself is ridiculous, in case you didn't know by now. Lohan plays Thea, a hapless but well-meaning secretary at a publishing house. She's just trying to get by so she can support her younger sister, since their parents were both killed in a car accident. Her cuckoo-mean boss hears her talking behind his back, fires her, but then is forced to keep her around after she lies and says "You can't fire me: I'm pregnant." Now I'm not a legal genius but I think you can fire a pregnant woman if she's bad at her job, especially if she hasn't even disclosed that she's pregnant, but whatever. Thea has a hard time remembering her huge lie for a while ("What 'condition?'") but then cue the fake belly and all the wonderful things that come with being pregnant. You don't have to pay your rent! People make you brownies. You get a seat on the bus and hugs from other pregnant women. It's the best.
Thea plans on aborting her fake baby until her crazy boss goes on leave and her new cute bespectacled boss takes over, promoting her from secretary to associate editor because there's a pregnant author who wants to publish a funny book about pregnancy and Thea obviously knows everything about pregnancy books because she's pregnant. Thea becomes a BETTER PERSON though through her fake pregnancy. She stops smoking and drinking and she suddenly has everything going for her at work, probably because the cute boss gave her a promotion and a pet project. The book's about to go huge when everything goes awry. I won't spoil it for you because you probably have no idea whether everything works out in the end or not.
Final verdict: dumb movie in which Lindsay Lohan fails to resurrect her career (it's clear she knows this, as she isn't doing any press for the film.) I don't think it was necessary to spend two hours to confirm this hypothesis but I was here to watch it so you didn't have to.
Grade: C-
Stray observations:
—I gave the movie a C- because I think when you start straying into the D's and lower people get perversely intrigued and I didn't want to encourage that sort of thinking.
—I can't believe I'm saying this but you know who had the majority of kind-of funny lines in the movie? Kevin Covais. From American Idol. "Chicken Little." Remember him? That guy.
—It's weird how it takes most publishing houses years to release a book yet in Labor Pains a book is sold and in stores before a fake baby has fully gestated.