The Mother
Jennifer Lopez’s impressive athleticism can’t save this dull action film.
Jennifer Lopez takes aim at the action genre with The Mother.
After realizing that the people she sells illegal firearms to are *gasp* bad people, a woman (Jennifer Lopez) tries to make a deal with the FBI. She goes into hiding, even giving up her newborn child to keep it safe.
Twelve years later, when the bad guys threaten her daughter, the woman comes out of hiding to show off her “particular set of skills” that will make the baddies regret ever crossing her. She shoots, punches, and explodes her way through Cuba, Texas, and Alaska to protect her kid, because she is…The Mother.
If this movie was called The Father, it’d star Liam Neeson be one of the four disappointing action features he makes every year. And while Liam Neeson may be happy to while away his later career with terrible action movies, it seems ludicrous that Lopez is accepting the same fate. She’s a capable performer with a flare for action choreography, she should have better projects available to her. But she’s had two dreadful romantic comedies and a listless action movie in the past 12 months. It may be time to change agencies or at least set new standards for the scripts she’s sent.
Still, on paper, The Mother shouldn’t have been a miss. Director Niki Caro has a penchant for strong female characters. Writers Misha Green (creator of the excellent and underseen Lovecraft Country), Andrea Berloff, and Peter Craig all have interesting projects in their backgrounds and scripts that heavily feature interesting female characters. And yet this movie feels like a first draft.
Caro and Lopez sell the action sequences. Lopez has also made a pretty great revenge action flick called Enough, which I would encourage everyone to watch in lieu of this film. A particularly thrilling chase through the streets of Cuba shows off what the movie could have been. Lopez is also a good brawler and believably barrels through fight choreography. It’s just a shame that the film slows down to feature dialogue, which is uniformly terrible.
Any time characters stop to have a conversation, it’s almost painful. The exposition is dropped at the audience’s feet with a dull thud. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that you wonder why The Mother would work with them in the first place. Everything that happens seems to be to keep the plot lumbering along between action sequences. No one acts like a person, Edie Falco is criminally wasted as the world’s most brashly inept FBI agent, and two leaders of an international arms syndicate are so comically bad at their jobs I began to wonder if the whole film was a satire about our failed law enforcement agencies.
There are a few flashes of character and performance, especially when Lopez speaks with her former military buddy Jons (Paul Raci). The two have an easy rapport and the hints at their shared history are tantalizing, so of course the movie immediately dismisses the storyline in favor of a bland plot and platitudes about being a mom.
The crux of the film seems to hinge upon the concept of motherhood as a primal drive in women. Lopez is given no name but “the Mother”. This is odd because the movie seems to care little about showing off primal behavior or exploring motherhood. While we have a few speeches from Lopez that boil down to different hackneyed versions of “everything I do, I do for my child”, the film blithely dismisses the other mother figure in the movie — the woman who adopted Lopez’s child. She’s shot trying to protect her child but ultimately sidelined, first by the feds, then by Lopez. A more interesting film might have had the two women team up, or at least interact, two versions of motherhood coming together to care for a child. But The Mother seems uninterested in the adopted mother’s pain, fear, or drive to protect her daughter because a movie that has time to show Gael García Bernal lighting roughly 400 candles before his showdown with Lopez could have probably spared a few minutes on beefing up the plot.
As for Lopez being a primal force, the movie does little to show it. She’s an able fighter and clearly a crack shot, but she also is the most well-manicured hermit the Alaskan wilderness has ever seen. Her extensions are perfect, her makeup flawless, and her clothing straight off the rack. It helps that Lopez is a great beauty, but it seems odd that a former military assassin in deep cover would bother contouring before stalking through the woods to kill a deer for dinner.
In case you have any doubts about the film’s thesis that there’s a primal protective aspect to motherhood, worry not! Lopez’s character has a counterpart in the form of a wolf, who’s also a single mother fiercely protecting her pups. The movie spends way too long crafting the beast into a belabored lone wolf mother metaphor, that doesn’t particularly work and is downright silly after a bit. Wolves raise pups in packs, sharing parenting duties, so a lone mother wolf would be an anomaly, something wrong with nature. After the 43rd sequence where Lopez and the wolf share meaningful stares, I began to wonder if the production just didn’t have the budget to hire a grizzly for a Mama Bear metaphor and rented a wolf instead.
Awash with cliché storylines and uninteresting acting, this is the type of movie that invites you not to pay attention. Put it on as background noise while you wash dishes or exercise, perhaps Lopez’s impressive pull-up ability will inspire you.
Verdict: I dare you to watch this movie without checking your phone once.
The Mother is rated R and available on Netflix.
