Jennifer Lopez has had a uniquely
interesting career. After starting out as a dancer on the sketch comedy
series In Living Color, she went on to become a hugely successful
popstar, a romantic comedy icon, and, according to a cursory Wikipedia search,
the highest paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood. However, As far as I know she’s
never played a Jason Bourne-esque killing machine, which she does in
Netflix's The Mother. She is pretty good. The movie itself is fine,
if perfectly forgettable.
The story of The Mother is fairly simple, which I
actually find refreshing. Jennifer Lopez plays an army veteran with super-duper
aiming powers who turns on some bad people and has to go into hiding as a
result. She’s pregnant at the time, so she gives up her baby and then goes into
action when that child is threatened by those same bad people. They bond, they
participate in a climatic snowmobile battle together. It all serves as a nice
reminder that motherhood can take many forms and that extended wolf metaphors
are very useful at conveying that fact if the audience somehow doesn’t reach
that conclusion themselves.
JLo’s turn as a tough-as-nails action star is a fun development that I
would like to see explored in future films, if not necessarily a sequel to this
one. She does the tough, quiet brooding thing quite well, and her dancing
background makes the transition to a more violent form of choreography a
natural one. The fight scenes in The Mother seem decent
enough, but it was kind of hard to tell because one of the film’s failures lies
in the editing of said fight scenes. The cinematography is so choppy when the
action starts and has so many cuts that these brawls rarely look like
continuous, fluid sequences, but instead come across as a Frankenstein’s
monster of separate split-second clips spliced together. I don’t know if this
was done in order to hide obvious stunt doubles or to make things seem faster
paced and more exciting than they actually were, but either way it serves as a
huge distraction to what otherwise might have been exciting set pieces. Another
thing that would have benefited these fight scenes greatly is some semblance of
a score. Jason Bourne got music during his fight scenes. James Bond gets music
during his fight scenes. So why does JLo get complete silence?
The script of The Mother is also not the film’s
strongest suit, filled with cliches and questionable FBI protocol as it is (I’m
far from an expert, but I don’t think the Bureau has the jurisdiction to go and
kill a bunch of people in Cuba while someone who should be in witness
protection tags along, even if the people in question were bad guys).
Everything that happens in this film can be accurately guessed far in advance,
leaving little room for surprises or originality. But thanks to its lead, straightforward
plot, and decent if sometimes hard-to-read action sequences, The Mother isn’t
terrible... it’s just not really good either.
The Mother is
now available on Netflix.
This review was first published in the Keizertimes on May 26th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/
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