Ask any good film martial artist and they’ll tell you that fighting in a movie is more like dancing than it is. Bruce Lee was famously a champion cha-cha dancer, and Patrick Swayze made the successful transition from dancer to action star, as many Indian films demonstrate. great dancers Produces great screen fighters.
That’s your chance, directed by Niki Caro (whale riderdisney live action Mulan) is Netflix’s motheris a dark action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as an unnamed assassin who reactivates to protect the daughter she gave up at birth. Lopez has great talent in the crime genre. out of sight and Hustlers. She is a fun comedic actor, is particularly good as a dancer, and appears as a fly girl. in living color before rising to global superstardom through her dance-focused music videos.
Unfortunately, neither of these skills are very useful. mother, it doesn’t give her much work. The plot and her characters are dark and serious, and her most exciting action sequences include long range shootouts and vehicle chase scenes. Several hand-to-hand combat scenes are edited beyond recognition, robbing viewers of the opportunity to follow the action and appreciate the effort Lopez has put into the role.
“She had to learn how to fight, but she’s really good at it,” said 2nd Unit Director Jeff Haberstad. said in a behind-the-scenes video About training for the role. “Her background in dance and choreography just makes her perfectly tuned.”
mother The story begins in the safety of the FBI, where Lopez’s pregnant character (credited only as “Mother”) acts as an informant while an agent interviews her about two dangerous arms dealers. Her interview ends badly, with battle scenes that are difficult to parse (thanks to Netflix’s compression and dim lighting) leaving her isolated, unfairly at odds with the FBI, and forced to leave her newborn daughter behind. I lost it. (To say the sequence incites her distrust would be an understatement.) FBI Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) says she’ll keep an eye on her daughter and call her if anything goes wrong. make a deal with Twelve years later, she moved to Alaska, but she actually gets the message that something is wrong with her.
The whole setting of the film is a series of thinly drawn characters and conflicts.of motherpeople don’t want us to see and believe it, or have the characters tell each other about her, to build her legend, as if she was creepy. Read the biography of the title character as if it were a story ( John Wickand more recently, Sith). Evil people show off their evil by pushing nuns in the streets. Gael García Bernal plays a cartoonish villain, an arms dealer who says things like, “You sold your soul to the devil, so why do you look so good?” It sounds fun, but instead you’re played as another unconventional villain who sexually blackmails the protagonist with a series of offensive pick-up lines, like some kind of perverted wind-up doll.
The most interesting point is mother The relationship between Zoe (Lucy Paez), a daughter who was estranged from her mother. A small part of the film she spends with the two of them while her mother teaches Zoe to drive, shoot and protect herself in the Alaskan wilderness. The two of them getting to know each other and making connections through situations is the best story of the film. mother, but Karo gets through it quickly. At one point, it was shocking when Mother mentioned the “months” they spent together. It feels like a week at most.
Some action beats work better than others. In the sniping scene outside the villa, The Mother can be seen letting off guard from a distance, allowing for creative blocking and framing of the bodies falling one by one. A few sequences in the second half in snowy Alaska at least look better than the dimly lit indoors in the first half, with more exciting things like explosive snowmobile chases and shootouts. There’s also a funny gag about his mother running over a man with her car while a nearby wedding party is tossing a bouquet, and the editing coincides with his flying in the air and bouquet’s similar arc.
But Caro and editor David Coulson even ruined those moments with bizarre cuts that pulled out the punch of the story. In one scene, Mother brutally interrogates a gang member while repeatedly punching him in the face. In fact, there is barbed wire wrapped around her fist, but instead of raising expectations of brutality by showing it wrapped around her fist, Caro uses it after Mother finishes hitting him. Only show it. His mother then pours water on him. This gives her the information she needs within seconds. Apparently we are in her 2000s again.
mother “Jennifer Lopez’s Action Movie” will be the second serial stream this year, following Prime Video’s action-comedy. Shotgun wedding.in the meantime mother Seeking more emotional depth, Shotgun wedding At least it recognized and tapped into Lopez’s core talent, giving her the opportunity to transform her comedic flair and movement skills. The end result for Netflix is a missed opportunity to redefine the star of a generation as a true action hero.
mother Currently streaming on Netflix.