STX Entertainment
So here’s a question for you: why is that female-driven comedies get a lot of flack? Institutional sexism is my guess, but unfortunately sometimes such movies aren’t as good as the talent they attract. Some people hated Ghostbusters and Bridesmaids, but this movie — well, this one isn’t as good as either of those two.
Bad Moms comes from the writer/director team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who have one decent movie (The Hangover) and a bunch of not good ones. Originally the movie was supposed to be produced by Judd Apatow, but he dropped out. Like many of the Jon/Scott movies, this one has some talented comedians and some weak material.
Mila Kunis stars as Amy, a mother overwhelmed by everything. She married young and has two children in school, is overworked and under-appreciated at her stereotypically “millennial” managed job, and has a cartoonish jerk of a husband (David Walton, who’s been in a lot better). After a particularly bad day, she gets angry and ends up befriending shy stay-at-home mother Kiki (Kristen Bell) and nutty single mom Carla (Kathryn Hahn, the real star of the movie).
Amy is also dealing with the monstrous PTA president played by Christina Applegate, who terrorizes everyone with the help of her minions (Jada Pinkett Smith and Annie Mumolo). Toss in a milquetoast love interest (Jay Hernandez) and you’ve got a clichéd storyline of a movie! The movie has about ten montages of varying levels of amusement, including a long party scene set in slow motion. There are a lot of gags, and many of them work.
But the movie also takes a lot of time to deal with drama, and it cannot deal with that well. The movie is best when it’s the three main characters, specifically Kathryn Hahn as Carla. Kiki is a mildly interesting character, highly clichéd, with a very typical resolution meant to elicit cheers from a drunken audience. Amy is even worse, being essentially a perfect cypher and a perfect human, a blank slate who’s only real flaw is caring too much and thus being overwhelmed. Some characters get extra dimensions to their monstrous behaviors, other not so much.
Amy’s husband is so over the top and such a jerk that it’s hard to reconcile that with the real emotions the movie is trying to elicit with a family breaking apart. I feel like I’ve mainly seen Mila Kunis be funny in That 70’s Show or the middling Friends with Benefits. She was a cypher in Jupiter Ascending but she had a bright, sparkling character in Black Swan. And honestly, she does fine here, but she’s the “normal” one in a movie of cartoons. It’s a weird juxtaposition.
Kathryn Hahn, dependable and oft underutilized, is great. I remember her being a standout in Parks and Recreation and a real gem in Wanderlust. She’s great, given the most ridiculous material but essentially consistently able to pull it off. A lesser comedian would come off silly, but here she’s the funniest one in the movie.
I think the movie is strongest when it’s focused on the friendship and the humor of their conflicting personalities, and less on the so-called “message.” This message is that moms are overworked (although in the context of this movie, it’s well-off mothers, which is a specific subset). Now, you’d be a fool to argue with that, but the movie paints this idea of rebelling as “bad” moms as somehow a panacea for problems, and that the solution is merely to do less. Fewer activities for the kids, fewer responsibilities in general. But … you know it’s not that simple, right?
Children often get pushed into activities they don’t want, but although sometimes it’s for the sake of peer pressure, other times it’s to make things better for them later on. Learning music, a foreign language, sports; these aren’t evils of society. The movie seemed to come from a real position of privilege, in the “oh it’s so hard the kids have so many opportunities” way.
I guess the message was too pat for me, and in a movie filled with satirical nonsense, I would’ve preferred a more balanced take on things. That’s just not what we got, but at least it’s partially funny.
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