Yahoo Movies Jennifer Lopez's Netflix movie The Mother is an enjoyably daft action thriller
After a couple of forgettable romcoms, Jennifer Lopez is back in her element as the Tough Chick You Wouldn’t Want To Mess With (see also Hustlers, Out Of Sight, Enough) in the slick if slightly silly Netflix action thriller The Mother.
Lopez plays the mother of the title – a former soldier/assassin whose name we never learn – who we first meet when she is being held in a safe house by FBI agents quizzing her about her two ex-boyfriends, evil gun runners Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal).
Of course, the safe house isn’t safe at all, and before she can tell them anything, armed men have shot the place up and Lovell has cornered our heroine in the bathroom, where he spots her large pregnancy bump and stabs it, just to prove what a truly bad baddie he is. Luckily, The Mother escapes when he is engulfed in flames from a little explosion she created using a few cleaning products and a candle (she’s a very resourceful former assassin, in case you hadn’t guessed) and goes on to safely have her baby. And that’s all in the first 10 minutes.
Jump forward 12 years and The Mother is living in the wilds of Alaska, having given up her baby girl for adoption to keep her safe. Her only friend at the FBI, agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), warns her that her daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) is in danger, however, forcing her to come out of hiding to protect the child she has never met, and to confront those bad guys – either of whom could be Zoe’s dad.
From here, the smartly-paced story takes Cruise and The Mother to Cuba in search of Alvarez, and a tongue-in-cheek chase through the streets is thrown in, involving every obstacle you can think of, from nuns and a funeral procession to a wedding and a group of school kids, before it reaches its hilarious conclusion with a bad guy flying through the sky in slow motion at the same time as a tossed wedding bouquet.
We also get that staple of many a revenge action film, the training sequence, when The Mother and Zoe are back in the snowy wilds and mum teaches daughter how to survive using guns and knives, as well as how to drive should the bad guys come after them again. No prizes for guessing whether those life lessons come in handy later on.
As you may have realised, it’s all pretty predictable – the biggest surprise is how underused Bernal, Fiennes and The Sopranos' Edie Falco (in a blink and you’ll miss it role) are – and at times, it’s quite preposterous, too.
But that’s part of the fun, whether you’re wondering how The Mother can speed off from a crime scene littered with bodies without the police chasing her, or puzzling why she and Cruise are sent into Cuba alone without any FBI backup to take out a whole gang of heavily trained, gun-toting thugs by themselves.
Happily, the movie never takes itself too seriously (and we shouldn’t either) and never pretends to be anything more than what it is – an action thriller that is a showcase for Jennifer Lopez.
And as that, it works brilliantly. Lopez – who rarely gets the acting credit she deserves – is extremely watchable as the resourceful, protective and even brutal (she hits people with a fist wrapped in barbed wire!) heart of the movie, and her scenes with screen daughter Paez are enjoyably unsentimental, too.
While we could have done with a bit more scene-chewing from a growling Joseph Fiennes, in the end this is Lopez’s movie from start to finish, and if you're on board for that, The Mother is an enjoyably daft action movie treat.
The Mother is available to watch on Netflix now.
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