So a day before Mother’s Day, I go to see the movie Mother’s Day without my mother (who is in Florida so… excuse!). The flick has been out a week and didn’t launch on mother’s day weekend because that epitome of mother’s day movies, Captain America: Civil War, came out this weekend.
I went to see this flick knowing it was going to be terrible – it’s at about 7% on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s by Gary Marshall who also did the Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Day movies. Like those, this is an ensemble flick centered around a holiday… starring Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts, Jason Sudeikis, Britt Robertson, Timothy Olyphant and others. Good cast.
And, you know, not a half bad movie either. I was surprised that I kind of got into some of the stories as much as I did. It’s kind of charming and sweet… and occasionally funny. But its humor is scattershot and any attempt to go for broad ba-dum-DUM type humor is a disaster with noticeable laugh-pauses that were awkward because… not funny.
I can’t fault the basic stories though – some work better than others but none of them bored me. There’s stories about divorced moms, new moms, people looking for their moms, and racist and homophobic parents visiting one daughter married to an Indian guy and another in a gay marriage. These parents are a little on-the-nose red state stereotypes and they say awful things that I think we’re supposed to laugh at but I appreciated what the movie was trying to do… though it kind of was hamfisted about it.
So, yeah, not such a bad movie and clearly I’m grading on some kind of curve because all those serious-minded movie critics hate it so much. I think they are pre-hating the movie because New Years movie was pretty bad (and Valentine’s Day too though I kind of liked some of those stories too). So take your mom? Maybe. I dunno. Probably not.
Score: 76