Release Date: January 9, 2004
Starring: Eddie Griffin, Anthony Anderson, Michael Imperioli, Method Man, Joanna Bacalso, Bai Ling
Directed by: Cheryle Dunye
Written by: Eddie Griffin, Damon Daniels, Brent Goldberg, David T. Wagner
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual content, language, some drug references)
There are few comedies worse than My Baby’s Daddy. It’s essentially a tame blaxploitation version of Three Men and a Baby gone wrong, since hardly anything about it is funny and there’s no reason to care about anything going on in the three main characters’ lives. The movie also has fewer good jokes (maybe two) than it does writers involved in the screenplay (four), and with its complete lack of drama and character substance it’s an absolutely boring and downright unpleasant waste of time.
The two jokes that are funny involve Eddie Griffin, who both co-wrote and stars in the film, and we’ll get to those in a minute. Griffin plays Lonnie, a shy and nerdy fellow who is actually the most responsible of the trio of friends who have the lead roles. G (Anthony Anderson) and Dominic (Michael Imperioli) are the other two, and they are more comfortable living in Lonnie’s uncle’s place than they are in trying to be respectable and finding a home of their own. Basically, it appears as though none of these men are prepared for a serious family life, but they soon have no choice when all three of their girlfriends (in an implausible and barely established twist of fate) all have babies at the same tine. Now the men must handle their barely detectable professional lives along with their new parenting responsibilities.
If you recall, Three Men and a Baby took a slightly different (and highly more successful) route with this concept. That story involved a stranded baby being found by three men, all of whom were comfortable with their social and business lives, and the heart of the picture dealt with their efforts to keep the child safe and happy while also keeping their lives as normal as possible. In that scenario, each character was interesting and appealing, and their humorous collective struggle to care for one baby made the movie work as well as it did.
My Baby’s Daddy tries to build a similar plot, but the three male leads are flat-out losers who inspire no sympathy from the audience when they’re in trouble and can’t be funny no matter how hard they try. Unlike Three Men and a Baby, this movie is stuck with three equally unlikable characters in an extremely unbelievable story (that three young men who haven’t grown up themselves might be somehow inspired to do so with the advent of fatherhood) that also includes three separate babies, three separate mothers -- and three different potholes in the plot.
These three guys, save for Eddie Griffin’s occasional shining moments of goofiness (which arrive, on average, about once every 30 minutes), have no reason to capture an audience’s attention, because they’re simply too dull, undeveloped, and barely have a solid comic gag to stand on. With his silly glasses and buck teeth, Griffin can get a laugh (as when he explains to G that Jesus is watching his baby when he’s not in the room), but Anthony Anderson and Michael Imperioli desperately need two pairs of comic crutches, and there’s no one or nothing in the entire movie to give it to them. So we’re forced to watch G bumble his way through a dead-end amateur boxing career and Dominic struggle to get an annoying and completely unfunny pair of white rappers signed to a record label.
All of this would explain why My Baby’s Daddy’s 90-minute running time feels more like Lawrence of Arabia’s three and a half hours. There are probably some comedies as tedious as My Baby’s Daddy, but such comparisons are only worth making if you’ve seen this movie -- and with any luck, you won’t.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)