Niki Caro is a fine director who doesn’t exactly utilize her talents in “The Mother.” It’s a movie that feels so very meticulously calculated as a means of reforming Jennifer Lopez’s film career from drama and comedy star to action star. Sadly, Caro’s direction is flat in what is pretty much a run of the mill mix of action adventure and family drama. “The Mother” has a ton of potential behind it, and presents seeds of interesting ideas. It just all gets lost in a haze of sub-plots, all of which are under developed, or left dangling in the air without much fallout.
An unnamed FBI informant (Lopez) and her handler Cruise barely escape from a bloody attack on an FBI safe house in suburban Indiana. The pregnant ex-spy gives birth to a baby girl while in the hospital recovering from her wounds. She’s presented with the ultimatum of escaping with the newborn infant and staying on the run forever, or signing over her parental rights so the child can have a normal life. She begrudgingly signs over the parental rights; but on Zoe’s 12th birthday, “The Mother” receives news that Zoe is in danger. Now she tracks down her long lost daughter and battles against an onslaught of armed gangsters in an effort to save her, and help her re-claim her once normal life.
What makes “The Mother” even more of a complicated movie is that it feels like two movies stitched in to one. There’s so much exposition in the first five minutes, and Lopez along with the team of writers take obvious inspiration from films like “Kill Bill,” “Atomic Blonde,” and “Haywire.” There’s nothing wrong with that but the writers never really do much of anything with those inspirations. The whole movie is centered on Lopez’s unnamed character (known as “The Mother,” mainly) whose past is left ambiguous, despite a hefty exposition drop in the first two minutes. While it feels like it was intended to keep her a riddle to the audience, it ends up feeling a lot more like the writers could never decide what The Mother’s back story was.
She was special forces—maybe? But then she is also a high ranking spy—who served tours of duty in the army… and was a well trained sniper. I think…? In either case, The Mother spends about twenty minutes globe trotting to figure out what her ex-husbands have in store for her daughter. Also, who was Zoe’s father? Did they want Zoe to keep or as a bargaining chip for The Mother? And was The Mother in love with William Cruise or not? What did the whole wolf allegory symbolize? The last hour is spent on a survival trek with The Mother and her daughter forming an uneasy bond and learning the tricks of surviving in nature. Again, none of that ever really comes to use later on.
So much of “The Mother” rides on what we could possibly see, but that’s about it. Lopez never engages in much hand to hand combat, despite doing a lot of chasing, and when she does dive in, she is awkward and stilted. For all intents and purposes, Lopez does have chemistry with co-star Lucy Paez, and I enjoyed watching them play off of one another. Lopez and Paez are really the only developed characters in the whole shebang, sad to say, as Joseph Fiennes and Gael Garcia Bernal are sorely under utilized. Lopez’s action vehicle is by no means at the level of the aforementioned female driven action films, but it’s at least never boring–which is about as much enthusiasm as I can muster up for this.
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