R | 1h 55m | Thriller, Action | May 12, 2023

“The Mother,” on Netflix, is a dark action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as a nameless former assassin, forced out of retirement in order to protect the daughter she gave away at birth. Does that whole premise make you snicker?

It’s easy to forget Jennifer Lopez is an accomplished, impressive A-list movie star, even though she nailed the crime genre early on with 1998’s “Out of Sight.” She broke into show business as one of the dancing Fly Girls on “In Living Color,” before earning global superstardom via her dance-centric music videos.

She can move, she can sing, and she does comedy like falling off a log. The reason it’s hard to remember she’s very good is because her filmography contains such excruciatingly heinous stinkers like “The Boy Next Door,” and “Gigli.” Unfortunately, while not horrible, the ridiculously titled “The Mother” also swims down more towards the murky depths of Lopez’s filmography pool.

“The Mother” opens with Lopez’s extremely pregnant, nameless character sequestered in an FBI safe house, with frustrated agents interviewing her about a pair of dangerous arms dealers. It’s one of those scenes where the agents don’t heed the talented killer’s warnings about imminent danger. One ends up very dead; she saves the other’s life, and then is forced to flee, leaving her new daughter behind in a hospital ward. This sequence right here already joins “The Boy Next Door” in off-the-charts lack of credulity.

Before she disappears though, The Mother makes a deal on the side with FBI agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), who will watch her daughter and contact her if anything goes wrong. Twelve years later, The Mother, living in Alaska, gets that unwelcome message that there is an imminent threat against her daughter Zoe (Mexican child actress Lucy Paez).

And so Mother’s child is delivered to her, at the rather romantic-looking, rustic cabin in the Alaskan outback that she lives in, with nice pine trees and wolves and such, so Zoe can undergo wilderness survival, sniper craft, and knife-fighting technique montages, in preparation for the inevitable encounter with that shadowy arms dealer who is so bent on revenge that he’s mobilizing at least one platoon of snow-camo’d special forces operatives on snowmobiles to do a snatch-and-grab, to the tune of, like, a billion dollars. He’s so incredibly motivated one might wonder if … that’s his daughter too?

“The Mother” opens on a fairly engaging note. Stakes are established, and Lopez’s performance is fairly believable, although her model-y face, in a sniper milieu … perhaps not so much? But no matter—the law of showbiz is that actors look good, so we pay good money to go look at them. I was drawn in and invested for a few minutes. Make it 20 minutes.

The movie’s got mostly thin characters and thin conflicts. People recite the title character’s biography to each other like she’s a kid’s ghost story or a legend, which is a tactic straight out of the “John Wick,” and, more recently, “Sisu,” playbook.

The usually top-shelf Gael García Bernal is completely wasted as another silly arms dealer spouting silly lines like, “You sold your soul to the devil, how do you look so good?” Bad guys demonstrate their evilness by knocking nuns off their feet in the street.

The best part about “The Mother” is the relationship between The Mother and her estranged daughter Zoe during the, uh, education of a junior assassin portion of the film. They have believable mother-daughter chemistry. What’s not believable whatsoever, is the Mother conducting a brutal interrogation, hitting a gangster repeatedly in the face with barbed wire wrapped around her fist, and then waterboarding him. Because she (with her model-y face) was in Afghanistan in the 2000’s, dont’cha know.

“The Mother” is the second straight-to-streaming Jennifer Lopez action movie this year, following the egregious Prime Video action comedy “Shotgun Wedding.” The latter at least capitalized on Lopez’s comedic talents, and used them to accompany her movement skills. Jennifer Lopez has the goods to do a Liam Neeson-like, late career segue into action hero mode, but it would appear she needs a new agent and/or manager to help arrest the piling-up of bad movie vehicles that waste her prodigious talent and keep us from remembering she’s a big talent.

“The Mother” is streaming on Netflix now.

‘The Mother’
Director: Niki Caro
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Fiennes, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Release Date: May 12, 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars