‘The Mother’ Review: Netflix’s Action Thriller That Takes “Generic” as a Compliment
From Netflix, you can always expect an action movie designed to cut short a boring or rainy afternoon. So far, we have seen movies like Extraction, Red Notice, The Old Guard, and The Gray Man. All of those movies now have sequels in development because they were very successful for the streamer. No matter how much critics criticized them, they were still popular among the mainstream audience, ultimately the most important thing for Netflix.
The Mother is just another one of those movies that don’t offer much in terms of quality. In fact, it offers very little, but we can see that this could be another one of Netflix’s successes. Primarily thanks to Jennifer Lopez, who carries this movie as a professional assassin who must combine her skills with a mother’s instinct to protect her daughter. For her protection, she left right after her birth.
As for the positive sides of the movie, the most that can be highlighted is Jennifer Lopez, whose charisma carries this movie. The fact is that Jennifer Lopez is not primarily an actress, she doesn’t have any dramatic acting range, but these kinds of roles, where she plays a badass woman, are clearly a good choice for her. It’s a shame that a terribly written script limits her performance.
The movie begins quite promisingly, as expected from a movie like this. It would be very good if the movie was aware of itself the whole time because then the final product would turn out to be much better. Unfortunately, in the second act, the movie begins to fall apart with a rather lazily written relationship between Jennifer Lopez’s character and her daughter. The action part of the movie almost disappeared there, and it became clear that it wanted to devote a little more to the characters instead of the action itself. While that can be good in some cases, it was pure sabotage for this movie.
The movie’s second act was extremely slow and boring because of that. Suffice it to say that the movie lasts an hour and 45 minutes, and at that moment, you start to wonder if it will end soon. Later, in the third act, all of that is somehow gathered and concluded, but by then, the will to watch to the end is already drastically lost, and the third act turns out to be quite lukewarm anti-climactic. Although the ending itself is wrapped up, we do not doubt that Netflix would be willing to invest in a sequel if this is popular enough with the general public.
The cast is relatively small. In addition to Jennifer Lopez, the main villain is played by Joseph Fiennes. He was nominated for an Emmy for his role in The Handmaid’s Tale and starred in some famous movies such as Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, and Enemy at the Gates. The movie also stars Omari Hardwick, who you may know from the series Power.
It cannot be said that there is no talent in the team here, but with such a generic script and rather weak direction by Niki Caro, who unfortunately did not leave a good impression even three years ago when she directed the live-action remake of Disney’s Mulan, which ended up being one of Disney’s worst remakes.
Ultimately, we don’t want to tell you whether or not you should watch this movie because that’s your decision, after all. But if you decide to watch this movie one afternoon, be prepared to forget it the same evening. It can be said that this is a generically written movie to cut two hours, but even among such movies, there are much better choices than this.
This action thriller tried to be something more than it should have been, and that attempt, unfortunately, sabotaged it. If there is a sequel, we’d like to see a little more emphasis on the action itself because that’s why we watch movies like this. Lopez has already filmed one more movie for Netflix, Atlas, which is currently in post-production. We hope that it will turn out better because it’s really hard to be worse than this.
