“You don’t know how bad this gets!” prophetically states Jennifer Lopez near the start of The Mother, the latest thriller hurled into the streaming ether by Netflix. To be honest, she’s not wrong, but there’s probably just enough going on in this aggressively serious thriller to ensure the views needed to justify the actress’ transition from Jenny from the block to Jenny with a glock, means all those pull ups she had to endure were worth it. That’s right, it’s yet another slick spy thriller from the streaming giant who seemingly have an endless amount of similar scripts ready to go before the cameras at a moment’s notice that are all crammed with gloomy espionage and bone-snapping brawls. Obviously the main draw here is watching its overwhelmingly glamorous star go back to such films as Enough and Out Of Sight to engage in the same kind of physical ass-kickery seen in such films like Atomic Blonde, John Wick and Extraction. To be fair, it’s a type of movie I’m surprised J-Lo hasn’t attempted sooner (the middle-aged marauder character is so hot right now) and she certainly convinces more as a scowling sniper than playing a dowdy fucking maid – but when all is said and done, The Mother could have benefited from a bit more hands on parenting.
After a spot of informing ends up with a clutch of FBI agents dead, an ex-military operative known only as “The Mother” barely escapes with the life of her unborn child after partially char-broiling villainous, ex-SAS rotter, Adrian Lovell as saving the life of sole surviving federal agent, William Cruise. However, after recovering in hospital with a knife wound in her pregnant belly, the Mother is given something of a tough choice once she gets the news that Lovell – the man she was informing on and the possible father to her child – probably has survived his fiery fate; keep her child and hope that going into witness protection will keep them safe, or waive her parental rights and vanish while her child is placed in foster care. Begrudgingly, she chooses the latter and twelve years later, we find her using her superior sniping skills to make a living in the snowy wastes of Alaska, however, once Cruise contacts her with news that her daughter, Zoe, is maybe in danger, she comes out of hiding to display a novel brand of parental instinct. However, despite her best efforts, Zoe is kidnapped by the men of flaky arms dealer Hector Álverez, not only the other guy she was originally informing on, but yet another potential candidate for Zoe’s biological father, so The Mother heads off to Cuba to take her daughter fact with as much force as she can muster that involves inflicting torture with barbed-wire wrapped fists and a whole lot of silenced gunfire. However, when things go awry and the resurfacing of Lovell means that The Mother and Zoe have to go on the run, the two will have to awkwardly bond in the Alaskan frost to survive the threat that’s hot on their heels.
Not unlike the steely-eyed sniper J-Lo portrays here with copious pull ups and a clenched jaw, there’s a certain apprehension I have when I cautiously approach a Netflix action/thriller that’s suddenly popped up in their top ten. Firstly, they all seem to be variations of the same bloody movie that all have similar set pieces, fighting styles and tone that sees a recognizable face buffing up to play a mythically capable military type who seems to lack any noticable character traits aside from being a tormented badass. However, I have to say, I was holding out a small sliver of hope that The Mother would be fairly watchable mainly because the movie was directed by The Whale Rider’s Niki Caro and also it’s been an age since I’ve seen a really good “warrior mother” movie in the same vein as the criminally underrated The Long Kiss Goodnight that shares more than a few similarities. Unfortunately, the movie ends up being yet another Xerox of the Netflix thriller genre that trades in a gripping plot and engaging action with the hope that the occasion gout of edgy gore and the sight of Lopez, girl bossing with rock-like abs at the age of fifty, is enough to garner some views. It’s certainly blindly watchable – I’ll give it that much – but some much of it seems cobbled together from other sources, I’m surprised the list of screenwriters in the credits didn’t legally require the addition of the names of everyone who has penned a female-led spy thriller in the last thirty years. Yes, there’s a lot of the aforementioned The Long Kiss Goodnight in there (the heroine’s child being the spawn of the villain is a biggie), but also swirling around in the recognisable slurry are large chunks of Black Widow, Salt and even The Rhythm Section, a movie I wasnt even certain that many people have even seen. Still, to decry a Netflix action movie as derivative is almost like a sky diver complaining that the wind is messing up his hair – you don’t really get one without the other, so I guess I’ll move on.
Lopez herself does well with the fact that she genuinely looks magnificent offsetting the fact that her gloomy character has all the personality of a rolled up carpet. However, despite uttering standard issue, warrior mother dialogue (“I’m whatever I need to be to keep her safe.” is a choice example) and the usual, stern bonding sessions where she funnels her long dormant mothering instinct into teaching her the best way to knife a guy, The Mother is a fairly bland, colourless character. “That’s okay”, I hear you say, “surely her actions with speak louder than her words” and while I applaud your optimism, the scenes of sniping, chasing and brawling don’t really connect like you hope they would despite the odd, impressive spot of bloodletting that slips through the net. The problem seems to be that through a peculiar mixture of odd staging and weird editing, it only looks like J-Lo is connecting with half of her blows which deflates mot only a lot of the tension, but a great deal of the excitement goes out the door with it. The rest of the cast feels bizarrely nonsensical, with Lucy Paez as Zoe on whining child duty as Omari Hardwick’s hapless FBI eye candy feels much like an after thought. On the bad guy side of things, Joseph Fiennes delivers an english accent so sinister, if it had a moustache, would be twirling it as if its life depended on it and Gael García Bernal seems to be trying to channel Javier Bardem’s Bond villain days while portraying his booze addled arms dealer.
While the script will no doubt fire off numerous feelings of deja vu in your distracted neurons, this wouldn’t actually have been a problem if The Mother wasn’t so predictably dreary (at numerous instances I found myself accurately quoting the dialogue before it had even been uttered) and run of the mill. Still between recoiling from a graphic bottle through the neck one minute and chuckling at J-Lo’s amusingly photogenic hair that proves to be far more durable than Fiennes’ various goons, it’s not a total loss. It just at this point, I’m not sure if Netflix is deliberately making movies that you can watch all the way though while tinkering on your phone – but in the case of The Mother, this is one parent you’ll probably neglect to keep in touch with…
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