Warning: Spoilers for The Mother.
People need to check their biases when it comes to The Mother.
The Netflix movie, which just premiered on Netflix and is a perfect lead into Mother’s Day, stars Jennifer Lopez. She plays a deadly female assassin who “comes out of hiding to protect the daughter that she gave up years before, while on the run from dangerous men.” It’s a little formulaic especially because we’ve seen way so many action movies before it that did the same thing. But honestly, I’m ok with it. And I’m going to tell you why.
The Mother isn’t here to reinvent the action genre. A crazy series of events that involve violence and insane feats? Check. Car chases? Check. A loved one/possible love interest injured by the bad guy? Check. Making dramatic promises to the villain to defeat him? Checks all across. It’s an action movie after all. And Lopez delivers on presenting a woman who is capable and has not crumbled under the weight that she carries on her shoulders. If anything, she just gets stronger, more calculating, and fights harder than her enemies expect.
This is where the biases come in.
Some are calling The Mother tired, uninspiring, and an excuse for gratuitous violence disguised as fulfilling parental duties. And honestly, it’s giving pearl-clutching complete with a gasp and hand to the chest with deeply ingrained biases to complete the meal. Because it’s really suspect that Jennifer Lopez, who I don’t even stan, is getting pushback to this degree because of a formulaic movie. Could it be because she’s a woman not falling into the stereotypical motherly role defined by our patriarchal society? Because it’s looking like that to me with a heavy dose of misogyny and toxic masculinity to boot.
Liam Neeson did three Taken films in the same vein as this and it was crickets on the pushback. Nicolas Cage has done multiple action movies where his daughter or someone else’s gets kidnapped and he’s the only one that can save the day. Crickets again. Even Denzel Washington did something similar in the classic Man on Fire. Then there’s Pedro Pascal. Which, no shade Pedro. But you’re in this too. He’s played the grumpy and heroic dad to a kid that he resists getting close to until eventually he does and they’re found family. And you don’t see anyone complaining. If anything, viewers want more of the grumpy dad whose heart gets thawed by a child.
And now that JLo’s entered the ‘grumpy parent with a child that she’s afraid to get close to’ space with tons of action, it’s a problem?
If anything, I think The Mother improves on the action genre as a whole. Too often action roles for women are written with men in mind. Then they just cast a woman, wipe their hands, and then pat themselves on the back because “their work here is done.” The Mother is written for a woman, that doesn’t ignore the garbage we go through even when in powerful positions like Lopez’s character. And through this character, we get to see a woman who lost her child, had to mourn that by herself, and who still showed up when her kid needed her. We also got to see a mother show her child love in a way that you don’t normally see in the media we consume. And she did that all while looking so real, messy, and with a clear directorial standpoint of the feminine gaze vs the male gaze.
But my favorite part of The Mother is that she left Zoe (Lucy Paez) at the end. She gave birth to Zoe and will always be a part of her. But she’s not the one who raised Zoe. She wasn’t the one there to scare the monsters away, kiss her boo-boos, or take her to recitals or events. That was Sonya (Yvonne Senat Jones), the woman who adopted Zoe. And as someone who was in the foster care system, I appreciate the fact that this movie respected and treated adoptive parents as actual parents and didn’t fall into cringy waters where “because they share blood, she’s the real mother.” Families are infinitely more complex than that.
Ultimately, The Mother is an action-packed movie that doesn’t reinvent the genre but looks at it through a lens we don’t get to see often enough in action movies. It positions Jennifer Lopez as the hero who is jaded, fiercely loyal, and who is trying her best, even when it’s awkwardly handing her kid a snow globe in a deserted gas station because she wants to show she cares in her own unique way. And it gave me something I’ve so desperately wanted to see every time a grumpy father/child duo came on my screen. Now we’ve got a grumpy mother with her precocious kid who she’s watching out for, even at a distance. And I wouldn’t say no to a sequel to that.
The Mother is now available on Netflix.
