'Mother's Day' - Review

½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

There’s a moment some undiscernible distance into the endless swill of naffness that is Mother’s Day when Timothy Olyphant arrives at a garden party. He steps out of his car, the camera slung low behind him, taking in the innocent surroundings as he proceeds with singular purpose in his stride. In a dark, desperate moment I spoke a silent prayer that a twist of Shyamalan-like proportions lay just around the corner, that Olyphant would choose that split second to reprise his role as the murderous assassin from Hitman. I waited for him to extract a weapon from his jacket and open fire, laying waste to the immaculate upper-class house, the tacky decorations littering its garden and the lecherous clown midway-through dispensing parenting ‘advice’ to Jennifer Aniston’s put-upon single mother.

Alas, my hopes were dashed as Olyphant entered the garden armed with nothing but a gurning smile to strike up yet another stale, witless exchange with Aniston. This is where we spend a large portion of Garry Marshall’s latest effort to transplant a greetings card onto celluloid: trapped in the same room as two or more characters it desperately wants us to love as they swap dialogue as pleasing to the ear as cutlery in a washing machine. 

Like Marshall’s previous crimes Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve, the film features several tortuously interconnected stories, set in what I assume is an alternate-reality version of Atlanta with no black people, where no-one seems to work, but can still live in the kind of houses that Members of Parliament used to claim through expenses.

The predominant narrative features Aniston as Sandy, with Olyphant playing her ex-husband. He has run off with a younger woman, leaving Sandy to raise their two boys and display her dissatisfaction mostly by gabbling every line and sitting in her car, screaming at the dashboard. Kate Hudson also stars as Jesse, a mother with racist, homophobic parents: after an outburst concerning her Indian husband, Jesse storms out in understandable rage, before realising her apparent ‘mistake’ when Ed Sheeran’s Photograph seeps into the sound mix with all the grace and subtlety of a hurled house brick. When Jesse’s own mother is brought face-to-face with the mother-in-law in an effort to bury the hatchet, it transpires that her foreign counterpart, too, is a bigot. “That’s racist,” she giggles “but also funny!”

Then we have Jack Whitehall playing a stand-up comedian (readers are invited to insert their own jokes here – trust me, they’ll be funnier than the film), delivering painfully stagnant observations (“I’ve got a baby, I don’t sleep much anymore!”) to an audience that responds with canned hysterics. Julia Roberts pops up every few minutes as a teleshopping presenter with a hairdo scarier than The Blair Witch Project and a plot contrivance that makes Babel’s second act reveal seem natural. 

Finally, we have Jason Sudeikis as a widower who answers his daughter’s request for tampons by shudderingly refusing to mention them by any name but ‘The T’. Teenage girls have periods; oh, the horror! A later scene sees him follow an emotional visit to his wife’s grave by tumbling jovially from a balcony, mid-rap, in salmon-pink trousers: hospitals nationwide should prepare for an influx of audience members who’ve cringed themselves inside-out.

Mother’s Day fails its own straightforward objective with staggering ineptitude, irritation, and vomit-inducing sickliness in a concoction devoid of humour, empathy or recognisable human emotions. We are betrayed even by its aspect ratio; the full-frame presentation depriving us of the ability to stare longingly into the comforting blackness of the letterbox bars.