Tuesday 30 August 2016

REVIEW - BAD MOMS (JON LUCAS AND SCOTT MOORE)


Moms deserve better. Practise what you preach, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, because the preaching is pretty good, but the practice is the very worst thing in Bad Moms. No rly, you were letting yourselves in for it with that title. Only the happiest of coincidences, a fateful alignment of the perfect coalescence of geniuses can produce a great work of art through mere circumstance and will; everything else takes effort. There's method to it, and this appears to be what Bad Moms misses. It follows various similar templates of how to craft a comedy, including adhering to several horribly unadvisable traits and tropes. Remember when all American studio comedies came drenched in incessant, syrupy scores? And I'm sure you're familiar with sitcom staging, wherein all of the action is confined to a specific space to make the direction smoother and simpler? And what of the cliche of casting characters as simple stooges, rarely seen in their own frame never mind granted their own personality, for the sole purposes of plot progression and fleeting comic relief? It's been some time since I've had the displeasure of witnessing such amateurishness in comedy filmmaking, but Lucas and Moore seem to be doing their best to resurrect it. I'll pass on Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell, but then I get to talents like Kathryn Hahn, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith and Annie Mumolo (honestly, though, Annie Mumolo!) and I can only despair at the dreck they're forced to regurgitate for the audience's apathy here. Their diligence and dedication produce the guts of what good Bad Moms has to offer, and they deserve better too. So do the rest of us.

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