Jennifer Lopez Fights Her Way Through New Netflix Thriller
by EG
Jennifer Lopez takes on the role of assassin in The Mother, a new Netflix thriller that sees the energetic Lopez taking on a plethora of bad guys. As the title suggests, she also has a child to protect, which raises the stakes and the tension level. Read on for details.
Make no mistake, the title character in the enjoyably ridiculous The Mother is given no name, but there’s never any doubt that she’s Jennifer Lopez. From the runway-ready fur hoodie she sports in the Alaskan wilderness to the flawless eye makeup and dewy complexion that withstand everything from childbirth to a knife fight in the snowbound woods, this is a performance so loaded with celebrity baggage it’s never going to be fully convincing as a deadly assassin. Yet JLo of course is the chief reason to watch Niki Caro’s action thriller for Netflix, which is better than average, as star-driven streaming features go.
New Zealander Caro got unlucky with her live-action Mulan remake, when its 2020 theatrical release was delayed and eventually scuttled by the pandemic, leaving the epic’s spectacular visuals to be diminished on Disney+. This latest feature from the director who broke out in 2002 with Whale Rider is the kind of thriller that was a mid-budget studio staple up until a decade or so ago. It now seems a good fit for streaming, generating enough tension and character involvement to be more than background noise.
Lopez is in intense, stoical tough-gal mode as an Armed Services veteran whose crack sniper skills made her the best in her platoon, notching up 46 confirmed kills during back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. We learn this through Edie Falco, in a cameo as an FBI special agent who helpfully recaps the protagonist’s military history for her — but really for us.
A prologue in an FBI safehouse in Indiana has “The Mother” still in her expectant phase, warning her interrogators that she’s not safe just in time for a rain of bullets to come down on them. She manages to save the hotter of the two agents, William Cruise (Omari Hardwick), before facing off against her arms-dealer associate and former lover, Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes), who stabs her in her pregnant belly before a hastily rigged explosive device sends him up in flames. Which makes Adrian an angry dude with a melted pizza face for the rest of the movie.
The limited employment options awaiting the protagonist after service helped lure her into criminal activity, first with Adrian and then with his equally shady associate Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal), with whom she also had a relationship. Her pivot to become an FBI informant didn’t go down well with either of them.
When her baby miraculously survives the opening assault, the mother is briskly informed that the only way to protect the girl from what will surely be ongoing pursuit by the pair of killers is to terminate parental rights and give the kid a new identity and a new family. She reluctantly agrees, extracting a promise from the indebted Cruise to provide the child with “the most boring, stable life there is,” and to send a photo every year on the girl’s birthday.
Twelve years after the protagonist has retreated to an isolated woodland cabin in Alaska, she’s summoned by Cruise back to Cincinnati, where her daughter, Zoe (Lucy Paez), lives a comfortable life with her parents. When Hector’s top lieutenants descend on a playground, the mother manages to pick most of them off with an assault rifle, but Zoe nonetheless gets snatched and whisked off to Cuba by a creep helpfully identified by the tattoo on his neck as “The Tarantula” (Jesse Garcia).
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.