Netflix’s The Mother misses a chance to make J.Lo an action star

By James On May 12, 2023

Ask any screen fighter, and he’ll tell you: movie fights are a lot more like dancing than actual fighting. Bruce Lee was famous as a champion cha-cha dancer, Patrick Swayze successfully transitioned from dancer to action star, and numerous films from India have shown how great dancers make for great screen fighters.

That’s the Chance director Niki Caro (The WhalerDisney’s live action Mulan) has with Netflix’s The mother, a dark action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as an unnamed assassin who returns to action to protect the daughter she gave up at birth. Lopez is a unique talent that made him excel in the crime genre Out of sight And hustlers. She’s a fun comedic actor, and she’s particularly strong as a dancer, coming out as a Fly Girl In living color before becoming a global superstar through her dance-focused music videos.

Photo: Ana Carballosa/Netflix

Jennifer Lopez sits at a bar with a glass of wine while wearing a pretty dress in The Mother. Behind her looms Joseph Fiennes, dressed in a suit.

Unfortunately, none of these skills are widely used The mother, which doesn’t give her much to work with. The plot and her character are darkly serious, and the most thrilling action sequences include long-range gunfights and chase sequences. The few hand-to-hand combat sequences are edited beyond recognition, depriving viewers of any chance to follow the action or appreciate the work Lopez put into this role.

“She had to learn how to fight, and she’s really good,” second unit director Jeff Habberstad said in a behind-the-scenes video about her training for the role. “Dancing and choreography background makes it so she’s just really coordinated.”

The mother begins at an FBI safe house, where Lopez’s very pregnant character (credited only as “The Mother”) acts as an informant, while agents interview her about some dangerous arms dealers. The interview ends badly, with a hard-to-parse fight scene (thanks to Netflix’s compression and some dark lighting) that leaves her isolated, falsely on the run from the FBI, and forced to abandon her new daughter. (Just to say that this series undermines credulity would be an understatement.) She makes a deal with FBI agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), who will keep an eye on her daughter and contact her if anything goes wrong. Twelve years later, she has moved to Alaska and receives the message that something has indeed gone wrong.

The whole setup of the movie is a series of sparsely drawn characters and conflicts. In The motherdo people tell her the title character’s biography to build her legend, instead of letting us see and believe it ourselves, or have characters tell each other about her, as if she were a ghostly story (a tactic used in John Wickand, more recently, Sisu). Bad guys illustrate that they are bad by pushing down nuns in the street. Gael García Bernal plays a cartoonish mean arms dealer who says things like “You sold your soul to the devil, how do you look so good?” – which sounds fun, but instead plays out as another villain who sexually threatens the protagonist with a series of played-out aggressive pick-up lines, like some kind of perverted wind-up doll.

Dressed in a leather jacket, Jennifer Lopez stands protectively in front of Lucy Paez, in front of a motorcycle, in The Mother.

Jennifer Lopez and Lucy Paez hold guns in the snow in The Mother.

The most interesting part about The mother is the relationship between The Mother and her estranged daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez). A small portion of the film is spent with the two of them together, as The Mother teaches Zoe to drive, shoot, and fend for herself in the Alaskan wilderness. The two getting to know each other and bond through circumstances is the best storyline in The mother, but Caro speeds through it quickly. It’s shocking when The Mother at one point refers to the “months” they’ve spent together – it feels like a week at the most.

Some action beats work better than others. A sneak scene outside a villa sees The Mother picking up guards from afar, allowing for creative blocking and framing as the bodies fall one by one. At least some of the later sequences in snowy Alaska look nicer than the dimly lit interiors of the first half, and are more suspenseful, including an explosive snowmobile chase and gunfights. There’s also an amusing gag in which The Mother hits a man with her car while a nearby wedding party throws the bouquet, and the edit matches his flight through the air with the bouquet’s similar arc.

Jennifer Lopez lays down in the snow with a sniper rifle, wearing a heavy fur coat, in The Mother.

But Caro and editor David Coulson even subverted those moments with bizarre cuts that power the story. In one scene, The Mother brutally interrogates a mobster, repeatedly punching him in the face as he asks questions. She actually has barbed wire on her fist, which Caro only shows after The Mother finishes beating him, rather than building anticipation of the brutality by showing her wrapping her fists with it. Then The Mother waterboards him, giving her the information she needs in seconds, because apparently we’re back in the 2000s.

The mother is the second direct-to-streaming Jennifer Lopez action movie this year, following the Prime Video action comedy Shotgun marriage. While The mother goes for more emotional depth, Shotgun marriage if anything, recognized Lopez’s central talents and used them, helping her hone both her comedic chops and her movement skills. The end result for Netflix is a missed opportunity to redefine a generation star as a bona fide action hero.

The mother now streaming on Netflix.