A Generic, Forgettable Action Movie

It wouldn’t be the summer season without a plethora of action movies to hit streaming and theaters around the country, and Netflix is prepared this year to start its summer releases with The Mother. Jennifer Lopez continues her streak of appearing in action movies and leads the film as the main character, The Mother, with a smaller supporting cast consisting of Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick, Gael García Bernal, and Paul Raci, just to name a few of the key cast members.

Kiwi director Niki Caro helms the film; she previously directed the live-action adaptation of Mulan for Disney in 2020. With a screenplay written by Peter Craig, Andrea Berloff, and Misha Green, The Mother aspires to add another entry into the female revenge story, but it’s a weak addition. The movie was officially announced back in 2021 with Netflix distribution and Lopez and Caro attached to the project. Months later, filming began, with the slated release date being May 2023, although there were some bumps along the way – COVID-19 caused the production and filming to be halted with the outbreak of new variants in 2022.

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Taking place in the United States, the remote regions of Alaska, and a tiny series of scenes set in Cuba, The Mother is ambitious, but regrettably fails to live up to the hype of its cast and safely lives inside the conventional tropes of the genre, especially when it comes to female vengeance and the stories that can be told with it.

An Assassin Tracks Down Her Missing Daughter

Netflix

Jennifer Lopez stars in the movie as a character who simply becomes known as “The Mother.” In the opening scene, she sits in a suburban house, becoming an informant for the FBI about Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal), who she brokered an arms deal with in the past. When one of the agents dismisses her fears about how they’re following them, rather than the FBI tracking the suspects, agents are shot down one by one, and The Mother, cornered in the shower by Adrian and revealed to be pregnant, is stabbed in the stomach. When the house catches on fire, she survives by starting the showerhead and lying in the water.

However, when she successfully gives birth in the hospital, her daughter is taken away by the FBI. They reason that because The Mother is a target to Adrian and Hector, she would have a better life away from her mother. The Mother leaves one plea to the agent who survived the ambush, William Cruise (Omari Hardwick): she wants her daughter to have a boring, stable life, and she wants a card for every birthday that passes. She moves to Alaska after seeing her daughter one last time, and the years fly by. But when a letter arrives in the mail that’s not a birthday card, The Mother realizes something’s wrong.

She flies back to the mainland, and when she meets up with William, he tells her that Hector’s men had a picture of her daughter, Zoe, with them after a bust. The Mother heads to her daughter’s school, seeing her in real life for the first time since she was a baby, but this distant reunion isn’t meant to last–as The Mother watches her from a distance with a gun and binoculars, and is helpless as she watches a man grab her daughter and put her in the back of a van.

This kickstarts a new adventure that will lead William and The Mother to Cuba, where she must confront the literal demons of her past. A new set of problems emerges when she does meet her daughter, as neither of them is prepared to confront the reality and trauma that comes with being separated from a parent figure and daughter from the very beginning. At the same time, The Mother still has to deal with the consequences of her past, as she’s also being hunted down by the men she once trusted.

Related: The Best Action Movies With Female Leads

A Rehashed Female Revenge Narrative

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If there’s one solid aspect about The Mother, it feels like a story that’s realistic for a woman character. Often women in assassin movies are delegated towards the classic tropes and are overly sexualized to fit a certain kind of audience, but Caro’s direction feels humane like Lopez’s ‘Mother’ is truly a woman who would do anything for her daughter. Her methods might be crass and a bit brutal at times, but she is realistic. She is on a mission, and no man is going to get in her way no matter how hard they are going to try and stop her. A lot of mothers can relate to those instincts when it comes to protecting their children.

However, the storyline of The Mother is one the audience may have seen many times before. At times the movie becomes reminiscent of its predecessors, like Jung Byung-il’s The Villainess, which was, in turn, inspired by La Femme Nikita. Many movies have touched upon the topic of vengeful women, and, in quite a few of these stories, their source of rage and vengeance stems from the fact they have a daughter. The Mother follows this formula, but the action moments aren’t enough to keep the plot going beyond the bare bones it already has.

Refusing to give The Mother a name boils her down to the core aspect of her motivations, making her nothing more than a mother trying to get her daughter back. The way she cares isn’t the typical way a mother is depicted in cinema and television, but she still loves her daughter and is willing to do anything for her. Despite how many flashbacks the film tries to conveniently give in order to explain her backstory, by the end she’s largely still just characterized as a mother resorting to the tactics and violence ingrained in her to get her daughter back.

Although these flashbacks try to build emotional tension and a payoff that makes us want to care more about The Mother, they ultimately fail by the movie’s end. The villains’ reasoning for their narrative arcs is flimsy at times, and they do not get a moment to shine. Some connections are explained through these flashbacks, but others are left dangling, making characters exist only when they are convenient for the storyline. In the two-hour runtime, convenience seems to be a recurring theme throughout what crops up in the movie, especially as the bad guys come closing in for their final sweep and celebratory champagne.

Related: Jennifer Lopez’s Best Performances, Ranked

Jennifer Lopez and the Acting Saves The Mother

Netflix

Jennifer Lopez is the glue holding the movie together, and she succeeds in her mission. She oozes charisma on the screen and becomes the character, whether she is in the snowy fields of Alaska or attempting to take down one of the ghosts of her past in Cuba. Her chemistry with her daughter is supposed to be uneven, as when they meet for the first time, there’s obvious tension because they weren’t in each other’s lives up until this point. Lopez puts on a stoic face for the vast majority of the movie, and while this could easily anger the other characters, it makes sense why she is the way she is.

Acting overall is one of the movie’s biggest characteristics, because although quite a few characters are hollow and archaic, the actors manage to portray the characters decently. But there is only so much that acting can do for a script that needs work, and, in the end, the action isn’t enough to motivate genre fans. There isn’t anything special in the way things end up going down, and some of the largest fights in the movie are fairly anticlimactic in the way they unfold. Even moments that are supposed to be surprising, revealing plot points that are crucial going forward, seem to happen like a deep, drawn out sigh.

While the world needs to see more women in action films depicted realistically, The Mother fails in providing a captivating experience. It is predictable from the very beginning, and while there are some nice shots scattered throughout the cinematography department, some questionable decisions may have been made with editing the final cut of the movie. Perhaps in an alternate universe, if different decisions had been made with The Mother, it would’ve been a movie that broke free of the constraints and molds of the genre. But, in this universe, The Mother manages to become an action movie with characters, plots, and visuals audiences probably are already very familiar with.

The Mother was released on Netflix on May 11, 2023.

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