Labor Pains

Poor Lindsay Lohan. The disgraced starlet, who quickly transformed from talented young actor into boozy, drug-addicted tabloid fodder, could easily write an anti-self-help book about how to flush your promising career down the toilet. In fact, she should probably start working on that book pretty soon, because judging from her latest cinematic stinker, she's going to be hard-pressed to find any more acting jobs that require her to do anything beyond looking bored and uncomfortable. With her career on the brink of extinction, Lohan's decision to sign on to the diseased comedy Labor Pains may be somewhat understandable, since it does represent a paying job. But even for a celebrity of her deteriorating worth, this movie is amazingly awful.

Supposing that Lohan actually read the script before signing on to this disaster, she must have had some vague notion that this movie was only going to hurt her deeply damaged career. By now, it's unlikely that Lohan is being sent a big pile of well-crafted screenplays for her perusal, so perhaps Labor Pains simply represented the lesser of two or three evils. Or maybe she derives some sadistic pleasure from forming one of the most demented filmographies in recent memory.

I really didn't think it could get any worse than her mind-numbingly idiotic 2007 "horror" movie I Know Who Killed Me, which earned eight Razzie awards (two for Lohan, who played dual roles), but Labor Pains somehow manages to trump that movie with its painfully predictable tale of a downtrodden secretary named Thea (Lohan), who fakes a pregnancy in order to keep her job. The whole thing starts off as a small fib and quickly snowballs into a gigantic lie.

To make matters worse, her new boss (Luke Kirby) is beginning to show a romantic interest in her and she is beginning to fall for him just as her obnoxious boyfriend (Aaron Yoo) is acting like a bigger jerk than usual. Oh if only I had a Magic 8-Ball so I could find out how this is all going to end! With one of those in my hand, I could ask questions like "will Thea end up ditching her boyfriend in favour of the sweet and clumsy boss?" or "will the truth of Thea's fake pregnancy ever come out?" and soon see a resounding answer like "it is certain" appearing in the inky liquid.

Stuck on the most transparently paint-by-numbers path that a movie can travel, Labor Pains is unable to muster up anything remotely resembling a surprise or even a convincing dramatic moment. The script, written by Stacy Kramer and Lara Shapiro, is so hopelessly contrived, so dependably dumb, that it is a minor miracle that I was able to crack a chuckle during one scene in which Kirby's character awkwardly retracts a comment during a photo shoot. Kirby is a likable guy and his clumsy charm is about the only thing that Labor Pains has going for it.

But even then, Kirby's performance isn't so much good as it is merely not as dreadful as everything else that populates this soulless exercise in regurgitated repetition. Every other character is a one-note joke and the various cast members (including Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines and ex-Saturday Night Live performer Chris Parnell) do nothing more than recycle their usual shtick with enough lethargic abandon to make a zombie look energetic in comparison.

There's supposed to be an honest life lesson buried somewhere in the narrative rubble of this pitiful comedy (pregnancy is hard, except there are perks, like you're guaranteed a seat on the bus and your landlord will let the late rent issue slide), but whatever good intentions lie behind this mess, Labor Pains remains a crushing failure. This generic movie would be completely forgettable if it weren't so hilariously, awkwardly awful. Lara Shapiro doubles as director on the movie, too, and her ability to call the shots behind the camera is no less questionable than her apparent writing skills.

It is wonderful that this movie about a female character going through a distinctly feminine experience is both written by women and directed by a woman, since so many female-driven narratives are told through the eyes of men. But while Shaprio and Kramer bring certain insight to the story that would surely be lacking if the movie were made by someone of the opposite gender, the problem remains that their movie is a gigantic pile of useless crap. Its sole purpose is to sound the death knell for Lindsay Lohan's career. Oh Lindsay, we hardly knew ye. Judging by this latest cinematic disaster, that's probably a good thing.