The Mother Review | Witless Protection

Underdeveloped, devoid of logic, and not even that much fun, The Mother is another poor attempt to give a floundering superstar a second career as an action hero. The superstar in question this time out is Jennifer Lopez, and while she’s convincing as an action hero, it’s the rest of The Mother that lets down her efforts. There’s a satisfying thriller at the core of The Mother, but the combination of a bargain basement script and an overly serious tone prove to be a lethal combination.

Lopez is “the mother” in question, a highly trained assassin and sniper who turns her back on her former employers – the military man who trained her (Joseph Fiennes) and a ruthless arms dealer (Gael Garcia Bernal) – and rats them out to the feds. At the time things go south, the woman (who prefers to remain nameless) is very much pregnant, and the father is likely one of the two guys trying to kill her. Shortly after giving birth, the mother is forced into signing away her parental rights as part of a plea deal with the feds (or something like that, it never really makes sense why this is such a sticking point). After lying low in the snowy wilderness for over twelve years, the mother gets word that the bad guys have figured out the identity of her daughter and adoptive parents. From there, she becomes determined to protect the life of the kid she never got a chance to know.

As far as thrillers based around assassins trying to protect an innocent loved one go, The Mother has a solid, if unoriginal concept. The set-up also shows some promise in the early going. It’s apparent from the off that Lopez is fully committed to the physicality of her role, and that director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, Mulan, North Country) knows her way around the action sequences. The set pieces aren’t anything groundbreaking by current standards, but they’re solidly constructed, executed, and feature some nifty looking bits (a body flying through the air intercut with a wedding bouquet being tossed, a clever cat and mouse chase in a parking garage). The budget is assuredly big enough to deliver some large scale chaos, and outside of an unfortunate over-reliance on rack focus, cinematographer Ben Seresin and Caro deliver a gorgeous looking, location hopping movie.

But goodwill towards The Mother turns out to be fleeting, as the script, credited to Misha Green (Lovecraft Country), Peter Craig (The Batman), and Andrea Berloff (Straight Outta Compton), grows sillier and more implausible the longer it drags out. Don’t look for anything akin to logic in The Mother because it’s one of those movies where people just do incredibly stupid things – both the heroes and villains alike – because there would be no movie if everyone suddenly wised up and stopped making critical, convenient mistakes. The relationship between the mother and her almost-a-teenager daughter, Zoe (Lucy Paez), is drawn in only the most basic of terms, never reaching a point of satisfying or compelling emotional resonance, with Lopez’s unwaveringly gruff performance constantly making one wonder why this woman ever truly cared in the first place outside of giving birth to the kid. The script here bears all the hallmarks of a work that passed through several sets of talented hands before someone at a higher pay grade decided to pick and choose what they liked best and cobbled it all together like Frankenstein’s monster.

The Mother has less in common with the current crops of John Wicks, Atomic Blondes, and Nobodys, and shares more DNA with the almost endless output of Luc Besson wannabe thrillers that stopped being cranked out around six or seven years ago. All those forgettable movies like The Gunman, Three Days to Kill, Peppermint, and Colombiana that tried to give a bunch of name brand actors their own potential acting franchises in the wake of the Taken? That’s what The Mother is trying to be. Not anything new, but a specific kind of action film that went out of fashion several years ago and wasn’t that successful of an approach to begin with. The Mother reeks of material that’s well beyond its expiration date, and not at all anything akin to the type of star vehicle most performers of Lopez’s calibre should be jumping the chance to appear in.

The plotting and pacing are arbitrary and predictable, and yet The Mother is still far longer than it needs to be considering that things are as well developed after the first ten minutes of the film as they are at the conclusion. Once Lopez’s character is tasked with caring for Zoe’s life, the wheels come off almost entirely, and The Mother backs itself into a no win situation. Zoe is understandably upset about her mom lying to her for years and only coming back to unleash violence all around her, but she still seems too petulant to fully grasp the severity of the situation. On the other hand, Lopez has made the decision to play this whole thing out in grumbly monotone, so this bonkers plot has to play out like an emotional flatline. Not even a stacked cast of thoroughly wasted supporting actors – including Omari Hardwick as Lopez’s connection to her daughter and Oscar nominee Paul Raci as her only close friend – can bring any life to this, especially Fiennes who might be aiming for camp, but instead plays his villainous role with all the energy of someone who just woke up and had to take a phone call.

It all builds to one of the most unintentionally hilarious and unearned final scenes to a film so far this decade. By the time The Mother reaches its audacious, woefully misguided, and far too seriously shot joke of a conclusion, the nervous laughter is almost appreciated. It’s the only thing that really provokes much of a reaction. After sitting through something as bland as The Mother for almost a full two hours, experiencing any kind of emotional release feels like a gift from the filmmaking gods. Maybe if the rest of the film had been that unknowingly playful – or if it had anything close to a workable script – The Mother wouldn’t be such a drag to get through.

The Mother is available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, May 12, 2023.