‘The Mother’ Review’: Jennifer Lopez In Niki Caro’s Tough-As-Nails Action Movie That Strikes The Right Balance
The Mother is a mutha of an intimately scaled action film, a violent female-centric drama about a hardened combat veteran who has great difficulty adapting to being anything other than a tough soldier, and that includes being a mother. Joining Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Gina Prince-Blythewood, Mimi Leder and the Wachowski siblings among women responsible for notable action features, Aussie director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, Mulan) has delivered a film that could easily have veered into sentiment at any moment but instead remains tough as nails and doesn’t go soft at the end. The film would surely have an even greater impact on the big screen but, as it is, launched Friday on Netflix.