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Baby Mama isn’t completely barren of jokes, but the cast has a hard time fertilizing the overdone material. If it were coming from Tina Fey herself, I would have been much more disappointed, but considering the film was directed by Michael McCullers (in his directorial debut) ,who penned such cinematic duds as Undercover Brother and Austin Powers in Goldmember , Baby Mama just becomes the next generic Saturday Night Live-inspired buddy comedy.

Fey stars as Kate Holbrook, the vice president of Round Earth, a Whole Foods type of grocery chain. It’s made clear from the beginning that Kate’s sacrificed her personal life in order to climb the corporate ladder, foregoing the traditional trajectory of marriage and kids in favor of monetary success and VP titles. Suddenly at 37, she finds herself wanting the life that everyone else has, so she visits a fertility doctor.

Upon learning that her chances of conceiving are approximately “one in a million,” thanks to her advanced age and oddly-shaped uterus, Kate ends up in expensive surrogacy specialist’s office, run by Sigourney Weaver. Kate is promised a surrogate who has cleared extensive background checks and exceeds her high standards of “not having some underpaid woman from the third world” carrying her child, for a steep fee of $100,000.

Unfortunately it’s at this point that the film starts to fall apart; Angie Ostrowiski (played by fellow SNL-er Amy Poehler) shows up on Kate’s doorstep with common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard) and a slew of white trash stereotypes and jokes ensue. Though clearly at the opposite end of the social spectrum, the film overlooks this and Kate befriends Angie almost immediately, even taking her in to live with her when things with Carl go sour. Think Immediate Family without Glenn Close’s bitchiness and Mary Stuart Masterson’s sympathetic version of a low-income unwed mother, add in several Big Gulps and jokes about Angie’s incompetence when it comes to childproof toilets and car doors, and you’ve got the basic premise here.

There are moments where Fey’s trademark wit shines through, and Poehler’s performance does earn some laughs, but the truly funny moments belong to Steve Martin in a small role as Kate’s hippie guru boss, who rewards his employees with “five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact” and constantly reminds them of how profound he is. Of course these brief bursts of laughter are nearly lost in the dumbed-down plot and picture-perfect ending, but they do exist.

I can’t help but feel, though, that Baby Mama would have been a far different movie if it had been written by Fey herself. Where her wildly successful Mean Girls forces viewers to acknowledge female stereotypes and challenges young girls and women alike to rise above them (all while making you laugh, of course), Baby Mama instead plays right into them, and never bothers to turn itself into the butt of the joke to teach us all a lesson. I would be disappointed in Fey and Poehler for selling out to be a part of something like this, but doing that would waste more time and energy than was put into the film in the first place.