‘The Mother’ Review (Netlfix): This Is The Deliciously Hilariously Silly Action Movie That Will Have You Hooked This Weekend

After a couple of forgettable rom-coms, Jennifer Lopez is back in her element as the tough girl you wouldn’t want to mess with (as in ‘Hus-girls of Wall Street’, ‘A Very Dangerous Romance’ and ‘Never Again’). in Netflix’s witty if slightly silly action thriller ‘The Mother.’

Lopez plays the title mother, an ex-soldier/assassin whose name we never know, who we first meet when FBI agents hold her in a safe house and question her about her two ex-boyfriends, the evil arms dealers. Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Héctor Álvarez (Gael García Bernal).

Of course, the safe house isn’t safe at all, and before I can tell them anything, gunmen shoot up the place and Lovell corners our heroine in the bathroom, sees her big pregnant belly, and stabs her to prove what’s truly wrong. what is it. Fortunately, “The Mother” escapes when the bad guy is engulfed in flames by a small explosion she created using some cleaning supplies and a candle (she’s a very resourceful ex-assassin, in case you haven’t guessed) and manages to have your baby safely. And all that in the first 10 minutes.

Fast forward 12 years and “The Mother” lives in the wilds of Alaska, having given up her baby for adoption to keep her safe. However, her only friend in the FBI, Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), warns her that her daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) is in danger, forcing her to come out of hiding to protect the girl she never knew and confront those bad boys, any one of whom could be Zoe’s father.

From here, the story paces us along as we follow Cruise and The Mother to Cuba in search of Álvarez, and they launch into a chase through the streets that involves every obstacle you can think of, from nuns and a courtship funeral to a wedding and a group of schoolchildren, before reaching its hilarious finale with the villain flying through the sky in slow motion while tossing a bridal bouquet.

We also have that staple of many a revenge action movie, the training sequence, when The Mother and Zoe are back in the snowy wilderness and the mother teaches her daughter how to survive using guns and knives, and how to drive just in case. that the bad guys come after them again. There’s no prize in guessing if those life lessons will come in handy later.

As you may have noticed, it’s all pretty predictable: the biggest surprise is how underused Bernal, Fiennes and Edie Falco from ‘The Sopranos’ are (you’ll miss it in a heartbeat), and sometimes it’s also quite absurd.

But that’s part of the fun, whether you’re wondering how The Mother can quickly get out of a crime scene littered with corpses without the police chasing her, or puzzled why she and Cruise are sent to Cuba alone, without any FBI backing, to take down an entire gang of heavily trained and armed thugs themselves.

Thankfully, the film never takes itself too seriously (and neither should we) and never pretends to be more than it is: an action thriller that’s a showcase for Jennifer Lopez.

And like that, it works great. Seldom getting the acting credit she deserves, Lopez is extremely watchable as the protective and brutal (she beats people with a barbed-wire-wrapped fist!) heart of the film, and her scenes with her daughter in the fiction, Páez, are pleasantly unsentimental.

While we could have had a better time with a few more scenes of Joseph Fiennes snarling, in the end, this is Lopez’s movie through and through, and if you’re okay with that, ‘The Mother’ is a delight of a movie. amusingly silly action.

‘The Mother’ is now available on Netflix.