Jennifer Lopez gives a rare bad performance in ‘The Mother’

The people behind “The Mother” needed an intervention. Someone should have explained to Jennifer Lopez and director Niki Caro that they were not making a serious movie. Someone should have also explained the joy and exuberance of well-made trash, as opposed to the deadly stiltedness of earnest awfulness. “The Mother,” out on Neflix in time for Mother’s Day weekend, is the story of a pregnant contract killer who gives birth to a little girl and immediately gives her up for adoption. But years later, Mom (Lopez) must re-enter the daughter’s life, because a whole cartel of bad guys has targeted the girl for assassination to get even with her mother for ratting them out to the feds.

Such a scenario has the makings of a stupid-fun genre movie. “The Mother” was never going to be an Ingmar Bergman-like investigation into the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships. The only two possibilities were stupid-fun genre movie or stupid-somber genre movie. Caro, by approaching a weak script with the same integrity that she’s brought to her previous films (“Mulan,” “The Zookeeper’s Wife”), ended up making the latter. As a woman hardened against having feelings, who channels her buried maternal love into fierce protective action, Lopez is at her rare worst. She and Caro seem to have defined the mother’s character in terms of what she lacks — as in she can’t express her feelings, she’s bottled up, she has become distorted by violence. But sorry, you can’t be excused for not providing your central character with something resembling a personality simply by suggesting that she no longer has a personality because of everything she’s been through.

It’s hard to know who’s to blame for this misguided performance. Was Lopez incapable of giving Caro what she was asking for, or did Caro push Lopez into colorless self-pity? Either way, it’s unusual to see Lopez look so self-conscious and fake onscreen, hesitating before she talks, swallowing her words, struggling to look like she’s struggling with emotion. In making “The Mother,” Lopez and Caro seem to be assuming they can turn an unimportant movie into something important by approaching every scene with intense gravity, that solemnity is the same as seriousness. But, lacking a quality script to back it up, such a solemn approach usually backfires.

In some films, it will backfire by making everything unintentionally funny. That’s not what happens here. “The Mother” backfires by making the premise and most of the movie entirely distasteful.