I’m not going to pull punches here because Mother’s Day is easily the worst movie I have seen in years. It is unfathombly offensive, boring, unfunny and terrible in every way possible. I didn’t head into it thinking it was going to be great, but I figured it would be on par with previous ensemble cast holiday movies. You know the genre: lots of famous people have multiple interweaving stories about love.
Mother’s Day is not that. To be that it would have to have a redeeming value somewhere in it. You’d have to laugh at at least one of the jokes. At the end maybe you got a warm fuzzy feeling. No, this movie crawled out of the bottom of some sort of barrel where they keep things that should die in the fires of hell. I went in expecting mediocre, I came out ashamed of every actor who agreed to star in this film and with serious concerns about the human race in general.
Mother’s Day
Director: Garry Marshall
Rated: PG-13
Release Date: April 28, 2016
I think Mother’s Day is supposed to be about being a mom because it’s called Mother’s Day, which seems like it would be the name of a movie about being a mom. It really isn’t though. We find Sandy (Jennifer Aniston), a divorced mom with two kids still kind of pining over her ex-husband who has recently married a 20-year-old. There’s Miranda (Julia Roberts), a HSN host who is somehow actually famous. And then Jesse (Kate Hudson) who has married an Indian man, Russell (Aasif Mandvi), without her racist parents knowing. Finally Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) has just lost his wife and is raising two daughters. Children actually play a very small part in this film as it’s more about romantic relationships than being a mom — don’t worry, it fails at romance as well. There are plot lines in here involving children and becoming a parent, but they’re buried under what has to be the worst screenplay written this year.
It’s seriously bad, and I’m not even discussing the casual racism it tosses around for no reason. The movie feels like the its four screenwriters (two male, two female) got together and wrote conversations for a group of women characters based on advice from an alien race who had only experienced conversations between females by watching soap operas. It is easily the most stilted tripe to ever pour out of any of these actors mouths. Watching the legendary Julia Roberts stoop so low in such a bad wig as some sort of favor to Garry Marshall was revolting.
The entire movie is revolting, especially since it somehow mistakes flat out racism for comedy. When Jesse’s parents find out she’s married to Russell as he accidentally walks in after they surprise her with a visit their first reaction is to wonder what a “towel head” is doing in her house. The audience at my screening instantly gasped and then sat there in horror as it only got worse. For some reason the filmmakers thought that the parents’ flat out offensive and racist actions would be charming and whimsical, as if we’re supposed to laugh along at those silly old folks who just disowned their grandchild for being “a little dark.” No really, someone says that.
I want to make it perfectly clear that jokes about race can be hilarious. Comedy is one of the best ways to address race issues, but this movie confuses using race for humor with actually being racist. None of the lines are actually jokes, they’re just racist (and sexist and homophobic) statements said out loud as if that’s enough to make something funny. Just because you say you’re a comedy doesn’t mean you can say offensive things without a punchline. There’s no deeper meaning here either. Sure, in the end everyone comes around and no one is racist anymore (because it’s that simple), but it’s handled with such dull-witted ineptitude that you can only sit there with your jaw open and wonder if anyone making the movie actually understood the history humanity.
I want to really stress just how incredibly out of touch with reality this film is. We’ll ignore the fact that all the characters are cliches, none of the actors seem to actually care that they’re there and that it easily has one of the worst soundtracks in the past ten years. We’re ignoring all of this because at the end of Mother’s Day Asif Mandvi, the only minority in the vehicle, gets out of an RV and a group of cops go to pull their guns on him. This is a joke. In the middle of a crisis of violence on minorities by police this film deems it appropriate to have an Indian man pinned to the ground as a group of white people, who very recently called him racial slurs, stand around gawking. That’s it by the way. That’s the joke. It just happens and everyone is OK with it once one of the cops RECOGNIZES THE INDIAN GUY AS HER DOCTOR. If I was Mandvi I would have walked off the set faster than an American Indian in an Adam Sandler film.
The only reason this movie didn’t get a zero is because Jason Sudeikis is so damn charming even when he’s stuck in crap like this. Crap where his meet cute is based around awkwardly buying tampons and then followed up by a second meet cute where his hand is stuck in a candy machine. Only that man could make something that stupid work, and even then one has to ask oneself why, in a movie called Mother’s Day, one fourth of the lead characters needs to be a father. I get that it’s supposed to be about the hole a mother leaves when she dies, but it really isn’t at all and it makes for just another bit of sexism to add into this already turgid pile of crap.
There’s about 50 other things wrong with this movie like why all the women seem to be constantly working out or why the only minority character aside from Mandvi and his mother is a sassy black woman. It would be impossible to catalog every way this movie is the film equivalent of the KKK projectile vomiting onto celluloid while a group of men attempt to write a screenplay about women with their penises, but I’ll digress because I’m getting too angry and this human excrement of a movie isn’t worth it.
