If you’re looking for a heartwarming movie about motherhood to watch with your mom, Jennifer Lopez’s newest action movie, The Mother, is not it. It premiered on Netflix on May 12, just in time for Mother’s Day.
Lopez plays the titular mother, a stoic ex-war veteran tangled up with some dangerous criminals, who comes out of hiding when her 12-year-old daughter is kidnapped. She had been in a relationship with these two villains, who were heavily involved in selling illegal weapons. After turning on them and becoming an informant for the FBI, she went into hiding. That’s how we first meet the Mother and one of the other main characters, Special Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick). Lopez is in the middle of trying to cut a deal with the FBI when the gunfire erupts.
The Mother SPOILER AHEAD
Lopez played this scene pretty calmly. It helped to illustrate her background in the military pretty well before it was even revealed. So, Mother saves Cruise, but out comes one of the big baddies. Ex-SAS officer and arms smuggler Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) shows up, and stabs Mother, which leads to a solid pregnancy reveal.
“Lopez plays the titular mother, a stoic ex-war veteran tangled up with some pretty nasty criminals who comes out of hiding when her 12-year-old daughter is kidnapped.”
Despite Mother being a mother, I didn’t suspect the pregnancy reveal at all. They hid her stomach very well during the earlier scene and covered it up so well that it came totally out of the blue. That was probably the first and last time I was surprised by a scene in The Mother. Lopez does not feel natural as a stoic ex-military woman. Her delivery is stiff for most of the film and even laughable at some moments.
You’d think that across the course of the film and when she finally reunites with her daughter, who, after being born, was given to another family to protect her, Lopez would loosen up even just a little. But the whole film, besides when she’s screaming at baddies or in pain, is done with the exact same stiff delivery. I must admit that she’s got very good sad eyes, so if she had worked on her delivery, she really could have delivered a solid performance.
My favourite performance in this film was actually from Lopez’s daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez). Paez has only acted in three other films since 2018, but it doesn’t show. Paez has a really natural delivery that pulled at my heartstrings on more than one occasion.
The rest of the cast was solid—they did what they were paid to do, and they did it well. Omari Hardwick was charming, and I liked his character. Ralph Fiennes did his job as the villain and was menacing at times, especially in the scene where he stabbed Jennifer Lopez early on. The second of the criminal pair, Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal), had a short but unsettling scene with Lopez that he sold very well. Bernal’s character was quickly taken down by Lopez in a super satisfying way, which brings me to the gore.
“This movie has a surprising amount of gore, and it’s super well done too.”
This movie had a surprising amount of gore, and it was well-executed. By “well done,” I mean it really grossed me out. I’m no ER nurse, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the wounds.
As for the action, it was fine. As I mentioned earlier, Lopez didn’t seem natural in this role, and that extended to how she moved. She appeared stiff, and none of it looked particularly fluid, even though the rage she portrayed felt genuine at times.
The Mother featured a generic chase scene through Havana, Cuba. Nothing new was added to this sequence—characters ran around corners, tripped over barrels of oranges, and so on. One part, however, did make me laugh: Lopez hops on a moped but gets blocked by a group of schoolchildren and has to wait for them to pass, a subtle nod to the fact that she’s a mother.
In fact, many scenes in this movie made me giggle. The oddly bad CGI fire in the opening scene, especially for a movie worth $30 million, made me snort. Every time a location title card slid onto the screen and then slid off, I couldn’t help but laugh. I even replayed the location shots a few times because they amused me so much—maybe my sense of humour is just broken. Lopez’s delivery and action scenes also got a laugh from me. One extra detail I really enjoyed was that one of the villains, Tarantula (Jesse Garcia), had a Phantom Troupe tattoo on his neck.
So, just like I said at the beginning of this article, this is not a movie you should watch with your mom as a heartwarming, bonding evening. If you and your mom want to giggle a little and waste an hour and 18 minutes, The Mother is great for that. If you’re looking for a better bonding movie to watch with Mom, there are a ton of options. Here are a couple of movies with great mother-and-child relationships: Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Brave (2012), Room (2015), Turning Red (2022), and even Mamma Mia! (2008).
