A movie not even a mother could love
|||MOTHER’S DAY
DIRECTOR: Gary Marshall
CAST: Jennifer Aniston, Timothy Olyphant, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis
CLASSIFICATION: 7-9 PG L
RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Jon Frosch
Even if you haven’t seen Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve, it won’t take long to figure out what kind of movie Mother’s Day is. The signs are there in the first few minutes: perky pop song over the opening credits, hokey voiceover, people rushing through morning routines and ill-advised dialogue.
Mother’s Day is bad from the start, and it doesn’t get better. Part of the problem is structural. Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve came equipped with teeming big-name casts, spread out across various vignettes; hacky and dimwitted as the films were, they never stranded you with anyone for too long. Mother’s Day features far fewer characters and subplots, stretched thin over 118 minutes; there’s no buffer between you and the movie’s ineptitude.
Aniston plays Sandy, a harried divorcee and mother of two whose ex (Olyphant) elopes with a bombshell (Shay Mitchell). Sandy’s BFF, Jesse (Hudson), is raising a son with husband Russell (Aasif Mandvi), but hasn’t told her conservative parents Flo and Earl (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine) because, well, Russell is of Indian origin and Flo and Earl are racists. Jesse’s sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke), meanwhile, has told Mom and Dad she has a fiancé named Steve when in reality she has a wife named Max (Flo and Earl are homophobic, too).
Jason Sudeikis is Bradley, a widower whose wife, a marine, was killed in combat. Their kids, Rachel (Jessi Case) and Vicky (Ella Anderson), try their best to tolerate Bradley’s overzealous soccer coaching and cluelessness about menstruation.
Julia Roberts plays Miranda, a home shopping network mogul who has a secret that involves Kristin (Britt Robertson), a young mom who’s not sure she wants to marry the father of her baby, an aspiring British comic named Zack (Jack Whitehall).
As you can guess, these different narrative strands will converge on the titular holiday. Along the way, there’s a meet-cute, a re-meet-cute, a wedding, a medical crisis, a runaway RV, a few reconciliations, several break-throughs and a climactic selfie.
The biggest laugh comes when Sandy’s son mistakenly wears his lion costume backwards in a school play, the tail protruding obscenely from his crotch.
The quartet of stars is the main attraction, though they’re not playing people as much as broad variations on their own screen (and off-screen) personas: Aniston is warm, self-deprecating and a little bit sad; Roberts is imperious, but with a heart of gold; Hudson is a bohemian-yuppie princess. Sudeikis is dorky-cool, a smart-ass with a soft centre.
What’s most dispiriting about Mother’s Day is how little life there is in it, how difficult the film is to connect to despite the inherent relatability of the material. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve, you will like this.