"Knocked Up" is fertile ground for belly laughs, lulls

Judd Apatow, writer/director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the new "Knocked Up," makes very funny movies, funnier by far than most comedies coming out of Hollywood. He fills them not with A-list actors coasting on their reputations, but fresh new faces and beloved if not tabloid-famous talents. (Consider, for example, Catherine Keener as the unexpected but perfect choice for the love interest in "Virgin.") He can do a happy ending that'll send you bouncing out of the theater, like the gloriously loopy "Age of Aquarius" number in "Virgin." And he knows how to create characters that seem genuinely nice, so you root for them to live happily ever after.

What he doesn't know yet, unfortunately, is how to pace a movie. So "Knocked Up," the story of a not-very-well-acquainted couple who find themselves expecting a baby after a drunken one-night-stand, falls short of a triumph. It's a very funny 90-minute movie, trapped in a 129-minute movie that has many, many dead spots and unfunny patches. By its end, in the delivery room (complete with explicit childbirth images that had a preview audience groaning in disgust), the humor has run its course, and the movie has worn out its welcome.

Too bad, because there's plenty to enjoy here. Alison (Katherine Heigl of "Grey's Anatomy") is an up-and-coming television entertainment reporter, ambitious and perky. (Scenes at work, with her double-speaking co-workers, are among the movie's funniest.) At a bar, she meets Ben (Seth Rogen), a chunky slacker who lives in frat-boy squalor with four buddies as they attempt to launch fleshofthestars.com, a Web site that provides details on famous movie stars' nude scenes. (None of them have bothered to find out, as it happens, that other Web sites pounced on this promising territory long ago.)

Fueled by too many drinks, Alison and Ben hook up (to the bouncily perfect strains of the B-52s' "Rock Lobster"); the next morning, over an awkward breakfast, it's clear that things won't work out.

Two months later, along comes a positive pregnancy test and a quickly resolved dilemma: Alison and Ben will have the baby and raise it together. And so begins the process of them getting to know each other for real, and of Ben learning to leave his bongs behind and grow up.

On the sidelines are Alison's skeptical sister Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow's off-screen wife, whose zingy line readings turn her character into a sort of screwball shrew) and her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), along with Ben's flock of interchangeable roommates, who are funny in small doses.

Heigl and Rogen both have a genuine sweetness, and you find yourself hoping against hope that these crazy kids can work it out. But they're given little to look forward to: Debbie and Pete have a fairly nightmarish, strained relationship that would turn any watcher against marriage. (Pete, at one point, describes marriage as "an unfunny, tense version of 'Everybody Loves Raymond.' ") It's odd, because Apatow's becoming known as a raunchy purveyor of old-fashioned values: "Virgin" extolled the idea of saving yourself for someone you truly love; "Knocked Up" presents a young couple trying to do the right thing by their unexpected baby. However, the future he shows them is bleak, even when Debbie and Pete mystifyingly seem to work things out by the end.

Nonetheless, laughs abound in "Knocked Up," and audiences starved for comedy should be happy here. You can always go out for more popcorn during the slow bits, or ponder the day when the talented Apatow will make a truly great comedy. It's coming, but it's not here yet.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com