“A Bad Moms Christmas” is a bad movie, from a pure cinematic way to being anything enjoyable during the holiday season. It fails to become a modern day Christmas classic as it seemed poised to do at its onset, or to even make a fleeting attempt as passable enjoyment.
“I’m Amy Mitchell, and this year, I ruined Christmas.” The opening narration is delivered by a beleaguered woman, played by Mila Kunis of “That ‘70s Show” fame. No sooner than Amy utters the line, a camel casually walks by her. We flash back 6 days in time to December 19th,and the movie seems poised to be a festive version of “The Hangover.”
Sadly, just a handful of minutes in, and we are lost on all promise of anything decent. The raunchy humor partners with a stale plot and overly cliché characters to prevent anything of note from happening.
Amy is joined by friends Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) who apparently all stared in an original movie that I missed called “Bad Moms.” The three women are plagued by their mothers, and each to a varying degree of clichéd relationship.
Amy’s mother (Christine Baranski) is overly critical of everything she does, with Amy spending her entire life trying to please and failing every time. Kiki’s mother (Cheryl Hines) is the opposite in terms of affection, but the recently widowed woman practically stalks her daughter in an obnoxiously overbearing way. Susan Sarandon plays Carla’s mom and offers the most amusement with her carefree and rebellious life and seemingly poor parenting skills, referring to her grandson as being 15-17 years old.
I was shocked to discover that both writers (Scot Moore and Jon Lucas) were men. I also discovered, with less surprise, that both men wrote the aforementioned “Hangover” series. The humor in “Bad Moms Christmas”seems to be on par with standard jokes designed at getting an audience of woman to laugh and missing with everyone else. Perhaps these two gents tried a bit too hard to make a movie that only women would enjoy, succeeding in making a movie that no one can.
While they rolled out every “mother” cliché known to man, they failed to create anything of interest. All the characters, daughters included, are pretty unlikable in the way they interact with each other. The three mothers show up a week before Christmas unannounced in all cases, and it’s just a reason to make some goofy jokes for 104 minutes.
Both writers also directed and that’s a shame since the movie lacks any form of direction. Two scenes in particular; one depicting the families at a fun park and the other a disgusting scene where Carla is waxing a male stripper’s genitalia are far too long and totally out of place with the rest of the script. It’s as if Moore and Lucas wrote these scenes first and then decided to craft an entire movie around them.
“A Bad Moms Christmas” is a forgettable movie. I may check out the original since it looks to be funny, but then again, so did this.
by – Matt DeCristo
