The new movie When the Bough Breaks is a chillingly uninteresting assault of mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, brain-bloating non-action. This is a line borrowed from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I used that audio clip during the boot-up sequence of Windows 3.1 back in the day to show how little regard I felt for that old operating system. I used a bunch of other similar sound bites – that was a good time when DOS was still a legit OS.
What does this have to do with the movie I watched? Well, I thought about that line a lot while watching When the Bough Breaks because it – and just about anything else – was infinitely more interesting than this turgid bore of a movie. I even formulated this review about that MST3K line… which is a meta way of saying I’m typing now what I was thinking watching this terrible movie. A movie that took three hours to watch for a ninety minute movie. And it was a private screening so only I was subject to exotic torture watching it in the theater… everyone else went to see something better. Like mold growing on damp walls, perhaps.
When the Bough Breaks is another in a long line of domestic suspense movies… some of these can be good and some can be trashy enjoyable like, say, The Boy Next Door. Not a good movie but at least it knew it was trashy. This movie thinks it’s serious or something… serious enough to be generic, by-the-numbers and tedious.
Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall can’t have a baby so they get a twenty-one year old girl to be the surrogate. Everything goes well until, you know, b*tches be crazy (sorry, but that seems to be the message of the movie). Her hormones (because she’s pregnant and pregnant women are nuts) go off the chart and she falls for Chestnut who never does anything wrong, so noble is he, and his wife (when she finds out how crazy the surrogate is) believes him completely so there’s no suspense there either. Surrogate girl kills her boyfriend and attacks people randomly but none of these are good reasons to call the cops – because, as the surrogate, she has all the legal rights to the baby. Pretty sure this isn’t accurate but good god this movie wants to be stupid, might as well let it be stupid.
Stay away from this movie – it lays there like a log, taking forever to end. There’s much better movies of this domestic suspense theme out there… some pretty bad even but still better than anything in this chillingly uninteresting assault of mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, brain-bloating non-action.
Score: 50