{"id":30336,"date":"2023-05-14T05:53:55","date_gmt":"2023-05-14T05:53:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shows4.com\/?p=30336"},"modified":"2023-05-14T05:58:18","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T05:58:18","slug":"jennifer-lopez-gives-a-rare-bad-performance-in-the-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shows4.com\/?p=30336","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer Lopez gives a rare bad performance in \u2018The Mother\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
The people behind \u201cThe Mother\u201d 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. \u201cThe Mother,\u201d out on Neflix in time for Mother\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Such a scenario has the makings of a stupid-fun genre movie. \u201cThe Mother\u201d 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\u2019s brought to her previous films (\u201cMulan,\u201d \u201cThe Zookeeper\u2019s Wife\u201d), 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\u2019s character in terms of what she lacks \u2014 as in she can\u2019t express her feelings, she\u2019s bottled up, she has become distorted by violence. But sorry, you can\u2019t 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\u2019s been through. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to know who\u2019s 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\u2019s unusual to see Lopez look so self-conscious and fake onscreen, hesitating before she talks, swallowing her words, struggling to look like she\u2019s struggling with emotion. In making \u201cThe Mother,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In some films, it will backfire by making everything unintentionally funny. That\u2019s not what happens here. \u201cThe Mother\u201d backfires by making the premise and most of the movie entirely distasteful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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