Labor Pains

It may not be the stuff Emmy dreams are made of, but it's still goofy, broad-strokes summer fun.

The movie’s premise--a secretary who feigns pregnancy to avoid being fired--isn’t terrible and neither is Ms. Lohan. Mostly because of how her part was written, it takes too long for Ms. Lohan to shed her Hollywood reputation and wan, stilted demeanor and get into the role.

Pains succeeds because of Lohan. As Thea, a publishing-house secretary living on the financial brink who rashly lies that she's pregnant just before her boss fires her, Lohan is a bright light in the center of an otherwise a fair-to-middling telefilm.

All told, it's a rather ignominious birthing process for a movie that isn't painful, necessarily, but delivers little that's worth paying admission to see, either.

If you don't think too hard about it--and don't mind seeing every single romantic movie cliche crammed in two hours--then you will find Labor Pains to be less painful than actual birth.

It's all good-natured, upbeat and occasionally funny. Janeane Garofalo has an amusing role as a sardonic talk-show host. But mostly the viewer will be drumming his or her fingers, waiting for the inevitable to play out, which it does, with no particular distinction.

Very little here feels original or even pregnancy-specific, from the farcically miserable boss (Chris Parnell, uncharacteristically unfunny, even when playing off a small dog) to the sassy best friend (Cheryl Hines, trying her best and smoking up a storm) to the see-it-from-a-mile-away office romance that threatens to unravel once the truth is revealed.