Not Bad, just disappointing
Bad Moms (R16) 100 mins
At least once a day, Amy Mitchell (Mila Kunis) feels like the worst mother in the world.
Attempting to juggle a morethan part-time job at a ‘‘a super hip coffee company’’ with corralling her two children to school and their copious extra-curricular activities, the 32-year-old is hyperstressed and over-scheduled.
It doesn’t help that she’s bullied by the William Mckinley High School’s PTA president (Christina Applegate) and gets no help from her feckless mortgage-broking husband. ‘‘He’s basically like a third child,’’ she opines.
Things reach breaking point when she discovers hubby getting intimate over the wi-fi with a dairy queen from the other side of the country. Throwing him out of the house, Amy decides it’s time to make some radical changes in her life.
Despite an appealing leading trio of Kunis (Ted), Kristen Bell (The Boss) and a riotous Kathryn Hahn (TV’S Parks and Recreation), Bad Moms’ joie de vivre founders on a predictable plot that somehow contrives to become a hybrid of virtually every female-orientated comedy produced in the past year.
Claiming this to be a love-letter to their significant others, writerdirectors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who co-scripted the The Hangover trilogy) come up with some clever set pieces and oneliners, but any chance of memorability is washed away in a tide of crude talking and set ups borrowed from recent ‘‘hits’’ How to Be Single, The Boss, Sisters and Bad Neighbours 2.
Expositional soundtrack cuts of ‘‘chart toppers’’ (from DNCE to Demi Lovato) stand in for any kind of internal character building, while it’s disappointing that ultimately the story becomes less about the women’s home or work lives and more about a school hall rivalry that feels like an adult version of Mean Girls or Heathers.
A hint of what Bad Moms could have been is glimpsed over the start of the end credits. It sees six of the main cast reminiscing with their own mothers about how they were raised and what the older generation thinks of how their grandchildren are being raised. It is fascinating, heart-felt and extremely funny. If only the rest of this over-worked, under-cooked farce had been made in the same off-the-cuff, raw vein or upbeat spirit.