Photo courtesy of YouTube | Jennifer Lawrence’s newest film, “Mother!,” faces terrible reviews (especially by Online Editor Trever McKenzie) and ticket sales in its opening weeks in the box office.
Mother! is infuriatingly ridiculous.
Sorry, did you want a better review? Well, I wanted to see a better movie. Guess we all can’t get what we want.
I genuinely feel sorry for Jennifer Lawrence. Not for her character, but for her. She already had to survive multiple death gauntlets in The Hunger Games. Now she has to survive the death gauntlet of salvaging her dignity from the corpse of this movie after it committed hara-kiri at the box office.
Few movies become as absolutely ridiculous as Mother! does by the end. What you think will be a psychological horror ends up becoming a comedy, an action movie, a war movie and a supernatural horror all in two pretentiously-filmed hours. Most frustrating of all is that Lawrence feels like a background character in a movie that exclusively focused on her.
The only smart decision the producers of this movie made was to keep the camera on Lawrence at all times. She truly was the only redeeming quality of this movie. While the rest of the actors’ performances were fine, Lawrence’s was the only one that felt genuine. Maybe it was because they filmed her actual reactions to being told that this movie was going to be viewed by the general public and cut them in post-production.
The movie is essentially a pretentious retelling of the Bible. I’m not joking. Read the first 200 pages of the Bible and you’ll have read the entire script of this movie. Even that is more entertaining. The movie metaphorically recounts the story of Genesis, Cain and Abel and the Virgin Mary in a way that would make a two-hour Sunday sermon with a nasally priest seem like a dubstep glow-stick dance party hosted by DJ Khaled.
Honestly, I don’t even know what the point of the movie is. It sets up Lawrence’s husband as God in the most on-the-nose way possible and then makes him the biggest asshole who ever lived. He essentially vomits on Lawrence’s whole existence because he wants friends. Is the movie trying to tell us that God is a bad person? That humanity is absolutely terrible? That the Virgin Mary went through horrible experiences? Don’t expect an answer to that question, because I’m still wondering. The movie is cyclical and goes absolutely nowhere.
Lawrence’s incredible acting talent is wasted on this dumpster fire of a script. It feels like the producers wrote a terrible movie and then coerced Lawrence into working on it so that they could actually get people to come see it. Her character could be completely erased from the first act with no consequences, and in the second act, you’ll pray for her pregnancy to catapult her and her baby safely to a luxury spa resort while the house and everyone in it crumbles into a sinkhole that leads straight to Hell.
The characters in this movie lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The main characters are completely disrespectful to Lawrence’s character at every single possible moment and blatantly ignore the fact that they’re solving their family issues in the house of a woman they don’t even know. The extras are probably the most annoying humans to ever walk the fictional Earth. At any given time, there will be a minimum of five extras doing something obnoxiously stupid that she just asked them not to do.
The ending of the movie is so blatantly obtuse that I almost started playing games on my phone. Are you ready to see Jennifer Lawrence torture porn? This is as close as it gets. I never wanted to see a pregnant woman running through a war zone/gang shootout/FBI raid in her living room and almost get raped twice, but Mother! made sure to fulfill the wish that no one ever had.
Go see “Mother!” if you want to experience the stupidest movie to ever be created, or to get gratification when Lawrence finally stabs and then incinerates the world’s most infuriating movie extras. Better yet, donate the money you’d spend on the ticket to a hurricane relief fund. You’ll help more people and you won’t want to get a lobotomy afterwards.
By: Trever McKenzie ~Online Editor~