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    Bad Moms

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

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    You’ve got your popcorn with real butter, a big bag of chocolate candies, a super sugary carbonated drink with ice and a stack of napkins as thick as your wallet. You’re looking for some laughs, preferably from a female-centered comedy. If you’re in the theater played “Bad Moms”, sorry, you’re in the wrong place. That’s being somewhat hyperbolic, as “Bad Moms” is not an awful film but it’s not all that well written. It squanders the potential it has and on a personal level, hit some of my personal pet-peeves.

    Amy (Mila Kunis) tries so hard to be the best mom she can be, but she barely holds it all together. Her daughter Jane (Oona Mitchell) is the same neurotic kid we’ve seen since the 90’s (think Macaulay Culkin’s character from “The Pagemaster”) and her son Dylan (Emjay Anthony) is just kind of dumb. Her husband? He slacks off all day. After catching him having an affair, she realizes that being a perfect mom is simply too much. Banding together with Kiki (Kristen Bell), a mother of four and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) is a single mom always on the prowl for a new man, they decree that they will decline the ludicrous expectations society has put upon them and be Bad Moms.

    What we’ve got here is another comedy set in the (say it with me) Universe-verse-verse of A-A-A-ssholes-holes-holes! A place where human beings don’t behave like people, because they don’t have real personalities, they have quirks. Amy works at a coffee company where everyone is 20-something, nobody does any work, they’re all obsessed with “Game of Thrones” and spend the bulk of their work days playing ping pong. Kiki and Amy’s husbands are not men, they’re a collection of lines to create conflict rolled into a ball and shoved in a bag of skin and hair. If you’re not a main character, you have 0 chance of getting any form of character development or displaying a genuine personality. More than that, everyone in this dimension has a predetermined goal to be a jerk to Amy, Kiki, and Carla. Outside of this goal they have nothing better to do. That’s when they appear. This film feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone, one in which there are no single fathers, no gay fathers, no dads who attend PTA meetings or bake sales – unless you count Jessie (Jay Hernandez) who is there solely to serve as a love interest. He has a daughter and she doesn’t get a single line during the whole film.

    Alright, let’s move past this. As long as the film is funny, we can forgive anything. This is where the film redeems some of the points lost by the predictable plot. Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn have great chemistry together. When the material they’re given is good (and it is once in a while) they generate solid laughs. Maybe I don’t “get it” myself, being as far removed as you can be from a woman with children who is struggling to meet society’s expectations but nonetheless, some of the commentaries these women make on their world did ring a bell and I laughed several times. There are moments when these women decide to be bad mom’s that are simply outrageous and it works both as wish fulfillment fantasy and as shock humor. This comedy is entertaining throughout; I can’t help but feel that this film could have been so much harsher, edgier and sharper. That’s me speaking. I don’t have to guess; I know that moms will find the film quite funny. I just wish the “slobs vs. Snobs” thing that develops as our trio of bad moms confronts the president of their school’s PTA (led by Christina Applegate) could have been swapped out for a story that wasn’t so safe. I wanted to see these bad moms have to find a way to throw parties in their homes with the children upstairs sleeping or doing their homework, see Mila Kunis flirt with the babysitter in order to get out of paying him for the night, or say “Pizza is a vegetable right? Pizza salad! Pizza slices for every meal! ” real “Bad Mom” stuff.

    “Bad Moms” has its share of laughs and memorable comedic moments. Ultimately, I don’t think it’ll stand out very much in your library of hilarity. If you’re looking for something that’ll force you to hold back tears, and you want some ladies in the lead roles, “Bad Moms” is just ok, a hard sell for me considering “Ghostbusters” is likely to be playing in the next theater. There is some material that plays during the credits so if you do see the film (and you should, it's worth seeing) stick around for that. (Theatrical version on the big screen, July 31, 2016)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  1.8.2016 age: 26-35 2,866 reviews

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