5.9

The Mother Gets Jennifer Lopez in on the Action, Then Yanks Her Out of It

By Jesse Hassenger  |  May 11, 2023 | 5:00pm
Movies Reviews Jennifer Lopez
The Mother Gets Jennifer Lopez in on the Action, Then Yanks Her Out of It
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Jennifer Lopez is aging well. This immutable fact isn’t just the subtext of her recent return to active movie-star duty after a few mid-2010s years on TV. It’s the text, often boldfaced; most of her recent films contain at least one scene where a third party marvels at the awe-inspiring condition of her middle-aged body (while demurring from mentioning her real-life age as any kind of exact figure). Lopez is a good actress – Out of Sight and Hustlers are the go-to examples for good reason – but she’s also a spotlessly maintained brand, which is probably why her long run of vaguely Sandra Bullock-esque rom-coms feels more like a product line than a filmography. (She’s made light romantic comedies into hits, but has she ever made any of them especially good?) It’s also why her pivot to steely middle-aged ass-kicking in The Mother feels like a logical move, albeit one that’s choreographed with a touch of self-consciousness. Of course Lopez should play an ex-military survivor who can kick, stretch and shoot her way out of sticky situations. There aren’t a lot of other careers that require such unforgiving dedication to physique maintenance – and she already played a pop star in Marry Me.

For its first 40 minutes, The Mother offers a tantalizing glimpse at a less glam Lopez, whose career spun off from Out of Sight and The Cell to land on EuropaCorp-style exploitation. The movie opens with efficient nastiness: A never-named woman (Lopez) is making a deal with feds to turn over information about gunrunners when their safehouse is attacked, killing most of the men inside. The woman evades kingpin (and her recent ex) Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes), managing to save herself as well as the life of a wounded Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), though Adrian gets away with some nasty burns. For minutes on end, director Niki Caro conceals, with gimcrack shamelessness, a crucial detail about the Lopez character: She is very pregnant.

Later, as she recovers in the hospital, a senior agent (Edie Falco in either a pointless cameo, or a role that was cut in post) lays out the new terms: The Mother will be separated from her just-delivered baby in order to protect them both. She insists that she’s fully able to keep her child safe. But the FBI, operating under the bizarre assumption that a woman with a baby would stick out like a sore thumb to any prospective assassins, won’t help unless she agrees to give up parental rights. Wouldn’t you know that many years later, the Mother’s Alaskan seclusion is broken by Agent Cruise, who informs her that her daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) has been found by those dogged arms dealers, who are still willing to expend plenty of money and effort to inflame some motherly rage in their former colleague.

So far, so ludicrous – and directed with satisfying propulsion by Caro, which is really what matters here. There’s a tightly edited sequence where the Mother, stationed in a parking garage with her sniper rifle, attempts to prevent a daylight kidnapping, and another featuring a chase through the streets of Havana. Caro has the opportunity to kick up more grit than she was allowed on the live-action Mulan remake, and Lopez’s athleticism serves her well, even if she occasionally looks like she’s modeling a new line of designer skulkwear during her downtime. For a stretch, The Mother is the kind of well-made action trash that should be a streaming-service staple.

Before the movie can sprint to the halfway mark, though, it undergoes a shift in tone, style and subject. In theory, an action movie slowing down to really attend to its characters’ emotional needs – in this case a prickly mother-daughter relationship, with a remote but visually striking backdrop – should be welcome. But The Mother doesn’t survive this shift; in true Netflix fashion, it feels like an algorithm recalibrates the movie to enhance its emotional impact. The Mother’s survival lessons for her frightened and understandably standoffish kid are an abstraction of tough love, not a genuinely felt expression of it, and the movie flatlines. While the movie softens up, Caro dutifully breaks out some Tony Scott-like flourishes, to diminishing effect. Her overuse of certain techniques, like a shallow-focus vignetting effect that blurs and distorts the edges of the image, starts to feel mechanical, especially in contrast with the no-fuss action that keeps the first chunk of the film moving at such a clip.

Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue. Lopez’s talent has plenty of support here, but the rest of the cast – a hammy Gael García Bernal, a dull Fiennes, and an underused Paul Raci – takes a back seat to a series of tediously symbolic run-ins with a mother wolf and her pups. It tracks that Lopez would want a greater acting challenge than simply conducting a full-body ass-kicking workout. As with many of her rom-coms, though, the vehicular design becomes too visible, obscuring any potential genre pleasures. She may the same age, but the movie gets old.

Director: Niki Caro
Writer: Misha Green, Andrea Berloff, Peter Craig
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes, Paul Raci
Release Date: May 12, 2023 (Netflix)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.

 
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