The Mother review: Did ChatGPT's dumber cousin write this JLo action movie?

Here I was, blissfully ignorant, thinking the fears of writers striking against big studios in the United States were overblown. One of their concerns, albeit quite far down the list, is that the studio will make large language models (or LLMs) like ChatGPT write movie scripts in the future, or at least the first draft. Even studio execs could not be that dumb, could they? Well, Niki Caro's action thriller The Mother is written by three people who have done much better work in the past. Yet, here they seem to be sleepwalking through a paint-by-numbers script.

The film, in fact, has a surreal feeling of being written by a particularly dumb LLM that was fed with scripts of several other, better movies in the genre. Itis painfully mediocre and hackneyed, so much so that even Jennifer Lopez's peerless star power and screen presence can barely make it bearable.

The story begins with a former assassin, played by Lopez and called just 'Mother', who finds herself on the run from some seriously dangerous individuals. In the opening scene, she is being questioned by FBI agents who have kept her in protective custody to lure and nab her former partners in crime. It all goes very wrong as all agents except one are dispatched by armed assailants. The pregnant belly of the Mother who is not yet a mother is stabbed by the leader of the attackers.

The Mother and the child both miraculously survive. She also rescues the lone FBI agent William Cruise (Omari Hardwick). As part of a deal with FBI, she has to give her daughter up since her enemies would never stop pursuing her, which endangers her daughter as well.

Cut to years later, the Mother learns the aforementioned enemies are onto her daughter's scent. She then decides it's high time to come out of hiding and protect her daughter, who is living with another family.

To me, at least, this did not exactly sound like a compelling setup at the outset. The script and screenwriters are unable to impart anything interesting or fresh. The dialogue is so corny that it would make a straight-to-video actioner from the 1990s blush. Thecharacters are your standard archetypes with minimal depth or development. It's as if the script took a checklist of action movie clichés and ticked them off one by one without adding even a hint of originality or nuance.

The action sequences are competently executed by director Niki Caro, but with a single exception — a fun chase scene in Havana, Cuba — lack creativity and fail to ignite any real excitement. They feel like recycled versions of scenes we have seen a hundred times before. It is hard to invest in the stakes and one does not feel any genuine tension.

If you're in the mood for some mindless action and have exhausted all other options, then maybe you can give The Mother a watch. Otherwise, you won't be missing out on much. Me? I cannot truly despise a movie that has JLo looking hot and kicking butt throughout. But this movie ends up being a huge missed opportunity.

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