‘The Mother’ Review’: Jennifer Lopez In Niki Caro’s Tough-As-Nails Action Movie That Strikes The Right Balance
deadline.comThe 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. Perhaps no star as survived more ups and downs in her career than has Jennifer Lopez, and while her performance here mostly calls on her to be lacking anything akin to sentiment, she powers through the film like the proverbial bat out of hell, or at least like John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon when he said, “Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.” Lopez is a killer of a mother, and no doubt a mother killer along the way; she admits — or perhaps boasts — that she knocked off 46 people while on duty in the Middle East, and is not someone to ever back down and do any less than kick her opponent’s ass.
That said, she is understandably obsessed with her daughter Zoe, but ultimately unduly so as far as the FBI is concerned; when the agency tells her that the only way to protect her child is to disappear, she obediently agrees, disowns the child, and takes off for Alaska.
Read more on deadline.com