Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%
I blame Billy Bob Thornton, really. Ever since he starred in Bad Santa, we've been treated to a litany of movie titles beginning with the word "bad". You've got your Bad Teacher, your Bad Grandpa, your Bad News Bears... Oh, sorry, that was a critically-acclaimed Walter Matthau movie from 1976.
Anyway, there was also Bad Moms, the sleeper hit of 2016 that spawned this sequel.
Somehow it seems the word "bad" has been watered down quite a bit in the process. Bad Santa was a truly bad person—a criminal, even—and the story he inhabited was unrepentantly subversive and antisocial. The great accomplishment of that movie was to present this awful person so sympathetically that his half-assed redemption actually feels uplifting. When Bad Santa says, "I beat up some kids today. It made me feel good about myself," it actually makes sense in context.
But the badness of the bad moms mostly just amounts to childishness, and it's haphazard at that. They're generally normal people, but they say cuss words and periodically indulge in a college-student-like obsession with booze and male nudity. Is this "bad" behavior? It's certainly a far cry from looting a department store on Christmas Eve and beating up children. It's the kind of thing we all kidded ourselves into believing was "wild and crazy" when we were 21, but really it was just mildly embarrassing.
Well, I don't often review contemporary movies, so I don't usually worry about spoilers. But in case you for whatever reason are considering seeing A Bad Moms Christmas, consider this your warning. That's assuming I can remember the plot.
The three "bad" moms—Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell), and Carla (Kathryn Hahn)—have returned for more hijinks just in time for Christmas. But this time, their own even worse moms (Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, and Susan Sarandon) have arrived in town to make life miserable for their daughters. Amy's mom is a rich snob hell-bent on making Amy feel like a failure (but adopting a completely random scattershot approach to doing so); Kiki's mom is a dangerously psychotic lunatic who watches her daughter and son-in-law make love from the corner of their bedroom; and Carla's mom is a pitiful, drug-addled drifter who blows into town to bum a few bucks from Carla.
The bad moms try to work off some of their holiday stress by getting drunk in a mall food court in the afternoon (am I missing something, or do mall food courts not serve liquor?) and then giving a department store Santa a lap dance. The problem with this scene—apart from the fact that it isn't funny—is that it's completely out of character. Two of the three bad moms are depicted as basically normal people, but normal people don't do things like this, or even fantasize about doing things like this. The movie makes no pretense of trying to justify this mayhem in terms of plot of character. It's in the movie so it could be in the trailer.
And because the scene was fabricated to generate trailer material rather than to tell any part of a coherent story, there is no need for the other mall patrons to call security to stop the three drunken madwomen, even when they steal a Christmas tree from a Foot Locker. You might think such a senseless act would result in a visit from the police, or at least a raised eyebrow from the dads and kids back home, but no. It serves its "comedic" purpose and is forgotten. The tree itself is seen once in Amy's living room in the immediately following scene, and then never seen or mentioned again.
The conflicts between the moms and the moms' moms continue to tread water for the next hour or so. Amy's mom is dedicated to realizing her own ideal of a perfect Christmas, but she goes about it in a clumsy and inconsistently written way. In one scene, she hires a work crew to build an expensive Disney-World-style animatronic Christmas display, which Amy's children implausibly find exciting (no real kid would give a crap about it), but moments later grandma is the kids' nemesis when she drags them to a production of the original Russian version of the Nutcracker. It's as if she has no motivations of her own and exists solely to create conflict.
Luckily, Amy saves the day by skipping the ballet and taking the kids instead to Sky Zone. (For those like me who were not in the know, Sky Zone is a real-life indoor trampoline park. So the entire scene is an extended product placement, a little bit less intrusive than the Krispy Kreme plot of the Power Rangers movie or the cringe-inducing Dunkaccino commercial in Jack and Jill. Or, hey, does anybody remember Mac and Me?)
Meanwhile, Kiki and her mother go to see a psychotherapist played by Wanda Sykes. The sequence plays like a Goofus and Gallant tutorial on how not to direct a comedy scene. Every time a joke manages to hit the mark, the scene goes right back off the rails moments later. At one point, when Kiki is just about to confront her mother about her disturbing behavior, the mom abruptly announces that she has cancer. Ironically, the movie's unevenness works to its advantage here, because after a half-hour of jarring shifts in tone, we can't be sure this isn't a genuine, ineptly-written plot twist. Then, seconds later, the mom breaks the tension by specifying her condition as "stage-12 heart cancer", which clues us (and Wanda Sykes) in to the desperate manipulation the mom is engaging in.
But for some reason, Kiki, who is not otherwise depicted as stupid, still thinks her mother is telling the truth. Having missed an obvious exit strategy from a joke that really doesn't have any more to give, the screenwriters instead have Kiki's mom admit her deception, then retract the admission, then try again with several more nonexistent diseases. In fact, she spends the rest of the movie retreading this flimsy gag. And once she walks out on the therapy session (in another sloppily-timed bit), Wanda Sykes forgets she's playing a character and launches into a bizarre standup-style put-down of Kiki.
I'm sorry to belabor this one scene at such length, but it illustrates the movie's refusal to follow through with its comedic premises. There is funny stuff in there somewhere, and another rewrite or two might have resulted in a great scene. They just couldn't be bothered.
So that brings us to the final mom, Carla, and her mom, Susan Sarandon. They spend very little time together, aside from the Sky Zone scene and another bit where they steal groceries from patrons on their way out of the supermarket. At first they dust off the old routine of pretending to be charity bell-ringers, but that quickly devolves into physically removing groceries from people's carts.
I have to admit the rapidly escalating ridiculousness of this gag had promise, but once again, the lazy writing and direction get the better of it. Outrageous behavior by the main characters is not funny in and of itself; the humor comes from the way the rest of the world reacts to the outrageous behavior. Here, the victimized patrons just stand there and allow themselves to be mugged—why should they care any more than the filmmakers did?
Apart from that escapade, Carla mostly shares her screen time with Justin Hartley, playing a firefighting stripper in need of a bikini wax. (I forgot to mention that Carla is a professional bikini-waxer at a spa. In her first scene, she refuses to service a rather hirsute young lady, whom she calls "Sasquatch", and passes her over for a senior citizen, whom she calls "Betty White". And that's the scene. They must have been delighted with their day's work. "Well, we've ridiculed hairy people and old people; let's hit that catering table!") The Justin Hartley waxing scene is very, very broad and obvious, but the way the two characters treat it as if it were a conventionally romantic encounter is within arms' length of being funny. But, of course, they go nowhere with it.
There's not much else to mention. I could describe the ending, but there's not much to say except that the moms and the moms' moms make their peace. The one thing I will say is that the reconciliation scene takes place during a Christmas Eve mass, and none of the congregants seem to care that the main characters are having a full-voice conversation in the middle of the church.
In a movie about moms, one thing that seemed conspicuously missing was any interaction between the main characters and their children. I can't even remember which kids belonged to which mom, except for Carla's kid, who is so slow-witted it makes you worry about his mental well-being, but it's supposed to be funny. In addition to kids, Amy has a boyfriend—Jesse—possibly the flattest character in the movie, who is a 100% perfect guy with no flaws whose only purpose is to be the butt of Amy's mom's snobbery.
I guess Jesse's other purpose is to have a child who repeatedly says the F-word. She says it about six times, and at first the joke is that she overheard Amy saying it (in bed), and Amy is embarrassed. Then, she says it a few more times for no comedic purpose, unless you happen to think it's inherently funny when little kids say the F-word. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't offended by this gag. There just wasn't anything funny about it. (Little kids love to say the F-word. That's old news.)
And that about sums up A Bad Moms Christmas. It's not hopelessly unfunny. It's just really, really lazy. Nothing in it made me laugh, but there were a few moments that made me think to myself, "Hey, that was a joke!" Amy's mom had a few scenes that had real potential, like when she turns up the car radio to treat the children to a particularly dissonant snippet of the Russian Nutcracker, or her grudging pseudo-apology in the big reconciliation scene. I liked the decision to allow her character to stay basically unlikable at the end of the story, but I think that was more the product of aimless writing than a conscious choice.
Were they in a rush to get the movie out by Christmas? Or did they just not care? I guess I can't blame them. They couldn't possibly have believed they were making a good movie. They just figured the title alone would draw in enough people to make it financially justified, and any more than the bare minimum of effort would be a waste. I don't disagree.
So that concludes my thoughtful, in-depth review of this motion picture. Obviously a person of my exquisite taste and discernment can't enjoy such a commonplace film.
Now to watch Ernest Saves Christmas for the fiftieth time.
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