JUNIOR (Directed by Ivan Reitman. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito, Emma Thompson, Frank Langella, Pamela Reed)

Forget the films of Buñuel, Lynch and Fellini, watching this mainstream high concept all star American comedy was far and away the most surreal experience I have ever had in a cinema. Eraserhead has got nothing on the sight of a heavily pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger in a dress and wig, gazing soulfully out of the window of a maternity clinic while the pseudo-sensitive MOR rock ballad sound of Patty Smyth’s ‘Look What Love Has Done’ plays in the background. Perhaps the strangest thing about this incongrous display is that at this point in the proceedings, director Ivan Reitman appears to be appealing for tears of sympathy, not of laughter.

Junior is Arnie’s third out-and-out comedy with Reitman, but what was first seen as a desire to extend his range is beginning to look like just another way of broadening his demographic appeal. Frankly, I’m not sure if Arnie’s comic range extends much further than the posters. Twins, Kindergarten Cop and now Junior are all one-joke comedies, usually expressed best on the hoardings outside the cinema. And the joke is always essentially the same one: an incongruous take on Arnold’s image as the most macho icon of our times. What is funny about the poster advertising Junior is not that it shows a pregnant man, but that it shows a pregnant Schwarzenegger. At this stage of genetic debate, it is remarkably easy to accept the notion that a man could be made pregnant. But Arnie? I’m not even sure that he is a man.

Actually, you have to be prepared to suspend belief right at the film’s opening, when you are asked to accept that the muscle-bound giant with the challenged vowels is actually a leading genetic scientist. In a character actor’s hands Dr Hesse would come over as a fussy, anally retentive, control freak but Arnie’s expressionless face and voice, teutonic haircut and muscles results in a kind of Doctor Terminator, with all the appeal of a Nazi preparing for the final genetic solution. He wears glasses, naturally, to signify his intelligence, but other than that there is little to set him apart from the killing machines he portrays so effectively in his all-action roles.

With his partner (and regular comic side-kick), Doctor Danny DeVito (apparently a leading gynaecologist, although, since this is a family picture, we never really get to see him in action), he has developed an anti-miscarriage drug, but when they are refused permission to experiment on a woman, they decide to try it out on Arnie. Impregnated with a stolen frozen ova, what looks like a bucket load of Arnie’s sperm, and pumped up with female hormones, Arnie’s teutonic facade melts as he takes on all the characteristics of a pregnant woman.

Actually melts is the wrong word. Distorts would be more apt. Arnie’s comic style amounts to pulling exaggerated faces, but it has more or less the required effect. His emasculation is not so much funny as hilariously weird. The script makes a dubious link between female hormones and such social feminine characteristics as cooking and dress sense, and soon Arnie is broodily moping around DeVito’s house complaining that the dinner is getting cold, his partner is always working late, he hasn’t got a thing to wear and his nipples are sore.

While the funniest moments occur in the scenes where Arnie and Danny play a kind of gender-bending odd couple, Reitman is careful to follow each such moment with something heterosexual to remind us that these guy’s are doctors, goddammit, not a pair of queens. So Emma Thompson is brought on (or rather, stumbles in) as the love interest. She makes a decent job of a banal role, straining for the light touch of a screwball heroine but saddled with a script that female clumsiness more amusing than verbal wit.

Schwarzenegger and Thompson make an oddly appealing couple – I mean, she’s no Katherine Hepburn, but then he’s no Cary Grant. With that kind of casting and a more finely tuned script, Junior could have aspired to great comedy, but instead it settles for making the most of its star power and milking the absurd situation for low common denominator laughs. It barely even considers the morals or reprecussions of the concept – the level of debate being summed up when Thompson’s ethical shock at their actions is dismissed by DeVito as typical of a woman: they’re always saying they wish men could experience pregnancy but they don’t like it when it happens.

But the film does serve a kind of function as a male guide to pregnancy. Popular cinema is so masculine that, although the poster boasts nothing is inconceivable it is virtually impossible to conceive of a blockbuster movie about a pregnant woman. Junior relatively faithfully takes us through the morning sickness, mood swings, broodiness, stomach cramps, self-loathing, emotional optimism and sheer physical difficulty and pain of pregnancy, creating a perspective that may impress on men just what women go through more than any pregnant woman story possibly could.

Mind you, the issue of breast-feeding is never addressed, though with tits the size of Arnie’s, I guess the film makers thought that was a given. Weird.