There’s some real ChatGPT film-making here in this abjectly formulaic and inert Netflix thriller from director Niki Caro, although ChatGPT would have made a better, clearer job of the muddled story. This one has Jennifer Lopez rescue her 12-year-old daughter from the bad guys on a number of separate occasions, with one villain (Gael García Bernal) vanishing from the plot about halfway in, presumably left on the cutting-room floor. It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.
Lopez is ex-special forces, skilled in guns and knives and unarmed combat, with what an official calls an impressive number of “confirmed kills”; she bitterly regretted being drawn into gun-running and people-trafficking after leaving the army, and getting involved with creepy bad guys Hector Álvarez (Bernal) and former SAS Brit Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes). She gets pregnant by one of them – the identity of the father is a fantastically uninteresting mystery which the film shows no interest in solving – and this personal event, combined with the horror of what she’s doing induces Lopez’s character to try getting out of the filthy trade.
Lovell tries to kill her, and the FBI offers her an amnesty only on condition that she hands over her baby to foster-care authorities and takes up a new identity in Alaska. But when she discovers, some time later, from a friendly bureau guy called Cruise (Omari Hardwick) that her sinister former colleagues are interested in kidnapping her now 12-year-old daughter, Lopez realises that she is going to have kick some ass and be a real mom to this adorable tween.
The Mother might have been entertaining, but the screenplay clunks and everyone is phoning it in, especially Fiennes who looks understandably bored and irritated by the whole tiring business.
• The Mother is released on 12 May on Netflix.
