The Mother Review: Jennifer Lopez Kills Everybody In This So-So Actioner

Just in time for Mother's Day here comes "The Mother," an action movie where we get to watch Jennifer Lopez kill a lot of people. This is the type of actioner they used to make in the '80s and '90s, and had it been made back then it probably would've featured Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme (it's just a little too low-rent for Arnie or Sly). Now we have Lopez stepping into the badass killer shoes, and she's fully convincing as she mows down nameless bad guys who get in her way. She's an unstoppable killing machine, and we buy it, mostly because Lopez is a good actor who clearly went through the movie rigamarole of learning how to handle firearms, lots and lots of firearms. 

Lopez's character, credited only as The Mother (hell yeah), was once a military sniper. And she was good — we're told she has "46 confirmed kills in Iraq and Afghanistan." Later, one of the bad guys barks at his goons: "Treat her as you would 100 snipers!" Yes, The Mother has the power of 100 killers in one nifty package, so look the hell out! Unfortunately, Lopez's character also has a lot of baggage. As the film begins, we learn she got involved with some very bad people — men with "ruthless business interests" — and now they want her dead. To make things more complicated, she's pregnant when this happens. 

"The Mother" wastes no time jumping into the action, starting off with a scene that quickly descends into a mess of shooting, stabbing, and explosions. A bunch of people die and Lopez decides to go into hiding. After being yelled at by an FBI agent (a blink-and-you'll-miss-her Edie Falco), Lopez's character agrees to give her baby up to a foster family in order to keep her safe. And you can probably guess where all of this is leading: years later, the bad guys will eventually come for The Daughter (who has a name: Zoe), and The Mother will have to kill 'em all and look great while doing it. 

Penned by Misha Green, Andrea Berloff, and Peter Craig, "The Mother" has a script thin enough that it borders on translucent, but you know what? That's fine. Action movies like this don't need to reinvent the wheel, they just need to give us the action — and "The Mother" does that. Unfortunately, a lot of the action happens in frequently underlit rooms. Ben Seresin's cinematography embraces shadows and dark rooms to the point where I was squinting at my damn TV, and TV is where everyone is going to watch this movie since it's headed to Netflix. The opening scene alone, set in a suburban home where Lopez is trying to work out a witness protection deal, is so dark that I started to wonder if it was set in the haunted house from "Skinamarink." 

If this darkness is meant to help hide a lower budget, that's a shame, because director Niki Caro (who helmed the live-action "Mulan") shows again she has an eye for action — when we're allowed to see it. There are fun, funny little quirks, like a scene where Lopez hits a dude with a car near where a wedding party is gathered to watch a bride toss her bouquet. The flipping, flying bundle of flowers is juxtaposed against a shot of the guy struck by a car flipping through the air — it garnered a big laugh from me, and not in a mocking way. In fact, I wish like hell "The Mother" had more somewhat goofy ideas like this. Unfortunately, there's not much room for fun here, and that's part of the problem. This is a dour shoot-em-up where Lopez mows down one creep after another with a stone-cold look on her face, and again: that's fine! Her character should be a stone-cold killer, that's kind of her whole deal. 

But that doesn't mean the film couldn't have some fun with all that's happening. You know those Van Damme and Segal action movies I mentioned above? They may not have been good movies (in fact, a lot of them are quite bad!), but they remembered to have at least a modicum of fun, giving the audience something to grasp onto. Not so here. Instead, "The Mother" barrels forward from one ho-hum action set piece to the next, sending The Mother on a globe-hopping adventure (she has some help from an FBI agent played by Omari Hardwick, which means she can easily jump from one location or even one country to the next with seemingly no money or hassle). 

I could sense a smarter script lurking somewhere within this thing. It's lightly implied that Lopez's character has PTSD from her wartime service, but this isn't touched on in any satisfactory way. And the relationship that Lopez longs for with her long-lost daughter is rather sweet but also undercooked. The daughter, Zoe, ends up kidnapped by one of the bad guys, a smuggler played by Gael García Bernal in a ghoul wig. You might think the movie will then be like "Taken," with The Mother spending the runtime trying to save her daughter. Instead, she saves her rather quickly, but don't worry, they're not out of the woods yet — there's another bad guy, the scarred Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes, kind of phoning it in and letting his burn make-up do the heavy work), who wants to get his hands on them. 

So The Mother and the now 12-year-old Zoe (a quite good Lucy Paez, who does a great job nailing down her character's ongoing horror at all this action movie stuff that's suddenly happening to her) head to the Alaskan wilderness to hide out. And this gives them some mother/daughter bonding time — time that The Mother has craved even if Zoe has not (she's spent her entire life thinking someone else is her mother). This section of the film allows "The Mother" to set up a bunch of Chekov's Gun-like concepts — she teaches Zoe how to be a sniper; hmm, wonder if that'll come back later?! — but it also grinds everything to a halt. Up until this point, Caro keeps the film moving at an even pace as the characters move around from place to place. Once they settle in one location, "The Mother" begins to draaag, and while there's some "The Last of Us"-like paralells of a gruff loner suddenly becoming fond of an inquisitive child, it doesn't amount to much. 

"The Mother" is, ultimately, a Netflix movie. I think at this point you know what that means. It means that either the streaming service dumped a ton of money on an acclaimed filmmaker and let them make whatever the hell they want (see: "The Irishman"), or they spent a smaller sum on making a hum-drum pic they know most people will half-watch while looking at their phones. "The Mother" is obviously the latter option in that situation, and while there's enough action (murky action, but action all the same) to keep you at least half-engaged with the material, you might want to spend Mother's Day weekend doing something else instead. Maybe mom wants to watch "The Irishman." 

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10