The Mother Review
Streaming Movie Review - Netflix
I grew up with the ultimate action hero mom, Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton trying to save her son John Connor from Skynet in the “Terminator” movies will always be my favorite action hero. I am always on the lookout for more films featuring women as the primary action figure. So when I saw that director Niki Caro had an action film on Netflix titled “The Mother,” I was intrigued.
The Mother (Jennifer Lopez) is in an FBI safe house where she suggests that she is not actually safe when the room suddenly explodes in gun fire. As an assassin, the Mother quickly dispatches most of the bad guys, but manages to save William Cruise (Omari Hardwick) before she runs into her former lover and arms dealer Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes). He stabs her in her pregnant stomach and she burns his face. Fortunately, her pregnancy is saved and the baby girl is delivered into the world and then delivered to a family where she can be kept safe from her mother’s life.
Twelve years later, the Mother is informed by Cruise that her daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) has been discovered by Adrian and Hector Alvarez (Gael Garcia Bernal), another former associate. The Mother rescues Zoe, but in order to keep her alive, she must impart all of her assassin skills to this young girl.
I really did want to like this movie, but I just had a hard time staying engaged.
The action in this is well shot and well choreographed. For a mid-budget film, it looked really good.
The performances were fine. Lopez looked fantastic as the unnamed titular character, though honestly, I thought at times that she looked a little too good. She takes herself very seriously as a hard-scrabble woman, but she still spends most of the film looking like a pop star. It’s pretty jarring. Paez does a solid job as the young daughter, and she has a terrified scream that definitely works for the role. Hardwick probably gives the best performance in the movie, but sadly, his role is relatively small.
The story is very by-the-books in a way that made this action film feel kind of boring to me. The parentage of Zoe is never answered and I think there could have been some interesting dynamics with that - kind of a “Mama Mia” but with guns and fist fights. Even the training in Alaska felt rote and uninspired. There were moments when the two of them could have bonded, but it never felt like they were fully explored. If the title is “The Mother,” it feels like there needs to be something compelling about either becoming a mother or stepping into that role 12 years later that really drives it home, but the film simply shows that JLo gave birth.
This movie was a struggle for me. Most genre films have a particular formula, and what engages me is either a compelling storyline or an interesting twist on the rules. From my perspective, “The Mother” did neither.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on June 3, 2023.
I’ll skip this one!