Jennifer Lopez Kills Everybody In This So-So Actioner

Penned by Misha Green, Andrea Berloff, and Peter Craig, “The Mother” has a script thin enough that it borders on translucent, but you know what? That’s fine. Action movies like this don’t need to reinvent the wheel, they just need to give us the action — and “The Mother” does that. Unfortunately, a lot of the action happens in frequently underlit rooms. Ben Seresin’s cinematography embraces shadows and dark rooms to the point where I was squinting at my damn TV, and TV is where everyone is going to watch this movie since it’s headed to Netflix. The opening scene alone, set in a suburban home where Lopez is trying to work out a witness protection deal, is so dark that I started to wonder if it was set in the haunted house from “Skinamarink.” 

If this darkness is meant to help hide a lower budget, that’s a shame, because director Niki Caro (who helmed the live-action “Mulan”) shows again she has an eye for action — when we’re allowed to see it. There are fun, funny little quirks, like a scene where Lopez hits a dude with a car near where a wedding party is gathered to watch a bride toss her bouquet. The flipping, flying bundle of flowers is juxtaposed against a shot of the guy struck by a car flipping through the air — it garnered a big laugh from me, and not in a mocking way. In fact, I wish like hell “The Mother” had more somewhat goofy ideas like this. Unfortunately, there’s not much room for fun here, and that’s part of the problem. This is a dour shoot-em-up where Lopez mows down one creep after another with a stone-cold look on her face, and again: that’s fine! Her character should be a stone-cold killer, that’s kind of her whole deal. 

But that doesn’t mean the film couldn’t have some fun with all that’s happening. You know those Van Damme and Segal action movies I mentioned above? They may not have been good movies (in fact, a lot of them are quite bad!), but they remembered to have at least a modicum of fun, giving the audience something to grasp onto. Not so here. Instead, “The Mother” barrels forward from one ho-hum action set piece to the next, sending The Mother on a globe-hopping adventure (she has some help from an FBI agent played by Omari Hardwick, which means she can easily jump from one location or even one country to the next with seemingly no money or hassle).