Jennifer Lopez in a scene from ‘The Mother’ | photo credit: netflix
If anyone can’t have Jodie Foster for a mother, JLo will do great. With Liam Neeson and his special skills, one would be set forever. nikki caro after gorgeous mulan and critically acclaimed whale Rider, turns its gaze on the action film and delivers solid thrills. This is a well-deserved film for Jennifer Lopez; the opposite of that awful, awful shotgun wedding,
The Mother (English)
Director: nikki caro
mould: Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick, Gael Garcia Bernal, Paul Rossi, Lucy Paz
Running Time: 117 minutes
Story: A killer will do what he will to protect his daughter
quite like planeearlier this year, Mother Wastes no time getting into the action. An unidentified female (Lopez) is being questioned by the FBI. She tells them two very bad men – Adrian Lowell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal) are after her and even though the agents assure her of her safety, she knows better.
His suspicions are proven correct when the safe house is breached. Just before Lowell is stabbed in the stomach, we learn that she is heavily pregnant. She improvises a bomb (apparently she learned to make explosives from a bottle of cleaning product in the same class Jason Bourne went to) and scrambles for security.
She gives birth to a healthy baby girl but is convinced to sign away parental rights for the child’s well-being. She does so, after extracting a promise from Agent Cruz (Omari Hardwick) to look after her daughter, informs him about her daughter’s life with an annual photo, and tells her immediately if the girl is in danger. Explain. “I want him to have the most stable, normal life possible,” she insists.
All is well for Zoe (Lucy Pease) for 12 years while Mom lives in the cold of Alaska. Then everything goes wrong. Zoey is kidnapped by Alvarez’s thugs. Off Mother and Cruz travel to Havana to confront Alvarez who is living in a quaint church-like mansion with many candles and brittle tapers just waiting to catch a spark.
There’s a little flashback as the mother tells Cruz how she got involved with these two despicable men. During her training as a sniper, Mother crosses paths with Lowell, an ex-SAS man who supplies “the powerful with things that are not on the menu.” Alvarez steals the weapon and Lovell finds buyers. The mother brings the two together and then sells them both when she learns they are not the only ones carrying guns.
There’s plenty of action and thrills and there are also quieter moments. Lopez is in top form, whether sashaying into a figure-hugging sheath, strutting through some nifty parkour, taking an impossible shot or telling Zoey the truth about the food chain — “There’s nothing you’ve ever eaten that didn’t come from violence.”
Fiennes carries on the grand tradition of Dag and he’s matched to the beat by Bernal, a slightly insane villain. Paul Racey, as Jones, is effective at centering the mother and the wolf and her pups are the cutest. A lean, mean fighting machine of a movie, Mother A pure cure. Get the popcorn already.
Mother is currently streaming on Netflix