CURSE OF THE MUMMYS
Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston can’t stop Mother’s Day being a cliched calamity
Mother’s Day (12A) Verdict: Star-studded, but dismal ★✩✩✩✩
The Boss (15) Verdict: Flabby but watchable ★★✩✩✩
ROMANTIC comedies are meant to tug on the emotions, and Mother’s Day certainly did on mine, making my heart bleed for all the fine screenplays that never get turned into films, while this ghastly barrage of cliches somehow ended up with Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts above the title.
It’s not as if octogenarian director Garry Marshall can’t craft a decent romcom. Long ago, in quick succession, he made Pretty Woman, then Frankie And Johnny.
On the other hand, he has more recently given us Valentine’s Day (2010) and New Year’s Eve (2011), in the process proving himself something of a Hollywood alchemist, able to turn witlessly silly pictures into box-office silver.
Compared with Mother’s Day, however, his previous two ‘holiday’ movies are works of towering genius.
This film, set in a sun-dappled Atlanta in which everyone lives in $2 million houses and does Pilates, claims to explore different aspects of motherhood, but does so as profoundly as a toddler with a plastic spade explores for treasure.
Aniston plays Sandy, a divorced interior designer with two sons and a penchant for talking animatedly to herself (always a sign of a bad script), whose hopes of getting back with her ex-husband (Timothy Olyphant) are thwarted by … well, you get one guess, and if it’s anything to do with a younger, curvier sexpot, then it’s the right one.
Roberts, whose four films with Marshall have followed a steady downward trajectory that has finally wound up at the bottom of the barrel, is Miranda, a ‘childless’ TV shopping entrepreneur with a bad orange wig and a big dark secret.
Then there’s Kate Hudson, playing Jesse, one of two sisters who have made marital choices certain to bewilder and enrage their cartoonishly racist, homophobic parents. That storyline yields the film’s most staggeringly ill-judged bursts of socalled comedy (it is truly dispiriting to find a fine actress, Margo Martindale, playing the mother).
But the competition is fierce, and also includes Jason Sudeikis as the token available male, a puppy-eyed widower, getting touchline rage while watching his daughter playing soccer. Like Aniston, Roberts and Hudson, Sudeikis is a romcom heavyweight, and it’s painful watching them all grappling with such featherweight material. Strangely, the one performer even more outside his comfort zone, romcom novice Jack Whitehall, looks moderately assured.
Maybe that’s because he plays a likeable but not-especially-amusing British comedian, with the unlikely name of Zak Zimm, and therefore doesn’t have to strain too hard.
Zak is the partner of yet another mother, Kristin (Britt Robertson), who cannot commit to marriage because she was given up for adoption as a baby and solemnly declares, in one of the many lines not intended to be funny which nevertheless forced me into a disbelieving chuckle, that ‘I have abandonment issues’.
The more perceptive of you might be able to work out how Kristin connects to one of the other major characters, as all these disparate strands are clumsily woven together in a film that is at least half a dozen rewrites short of deserving any audience at all (do not take a bow, screenwriters Matt Walker, Tom Hines and Anya Kochoff Romano).
Depressingly, with such a starry cast, it will doubtless get one.
THE BOSS stars Melissa McCarthy, which also guarantees an audience. It is twice as funny as Mother’s Day, and twice as original, meriting twice as many stars. Which is not, alas, all that much of a recommendation.
McCarthy is Michelle Darnell, a
Trumpishly go-getting tycoon and famous investment guru — the 47th richest woman in America, no less — whose single-minded ruthlessness has been forged out of an orphanage childhood, and a series of crushing rejections by foster parents. ‘Families are for suckers’ is her lifelong maxim.
Michelle (a character invented by McCarthy years ago for her stand-up routines) doesn’t need anybody or anything to bolster her Olympian selfconfidence. But she does rely more than she knows on her capable personal assistant, single mother Claire Rawlings (Kristen Bell).
When Michelle’s former lover and bitter business rival, a poisonous dwarf called Renault (Peter Dinklage), rats on her for insider-trading, she cannot bribe her way out of a prison term, from which she emerges broke but only marginally more humble.
YeT Claire takes pity on her former boss, giving her shelter and also a way back into a business career, through a scheme to massproduce Claire’s delicious brownies.
Inevitably, Claire and her daughter Rachel (ella Anderson) soon help Michelle locate a mushier side to her personality, abiding by the unwritten rule that major movie stars don’t play crass egotists motivated only by personal greed without a pathway to redemption (see also Money Monster, with George Clooney).
Despite its thorough predictability, the consequence of a flabby screenplay and decidedly lazy plotting, The Boss is never less than watchable, and just occasionally genuinely funny.
This owes almost everything to McCarthy’s relentless charisma and infallible comic timing, and almost nothing to (her husband and co-writer) Ben Falcone’s direction.
But he probably deserves a small share of the credit for an uproariously daft routine in which Michelle and Claire put the ‘slap’ in slapstick, when assessing one another’s (fully clothed) breasts.
It is, in more ways than one, the bounciest scene in a film that is less than the sum of its parts. And yet, if you see only one new comedy this weekend, make sure it’s this one.