A week in the life of a suburban parent.
There is a scene early on in the new comedy Bad Moms, written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, where the trio of moms at the center of the film take a drunken trip to the grocery store. It is one of their early acts of defiance, of breaking away from the status quo. It is the moment where the R-rated comedy has a great opportunity to show just how raunchy and over-the-top it is willing to be. Sadly, the grocery store sequence is not terribly funny. It is a misstep from which the film does eventually recover, but which turns out to be one of the many moments that fails to live up to the film's comedic potential and which stops a good movie from being great.
Mila Kunis stars as Amy, a (part-time) working mom who married young and has two kids (Oona Laurence and Emjay Anthony) with her relatively lazy husband, Mike (David Walton). All Amy wants is some peace and quiet; some alone time when she doesn't have to do a homework project or make cookies for a PTA bake sale or avert some sort of work crisis for her boss, Dale (Clark Duke). After she finds her husband having an online affair, Amy boots him out and breaks bad with the help of single mom, Carla (Kathryn Hahn), and stay-at-home mother of four, Kiki (Kristen Bell).
Bad Moms is an entry in the slobs versus snobs genre with Amy and company taking on PTA President Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate) and her minions, Stacy (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Vicky (Annie Mumolo). The end goal is the PTA Presidency, currently held by Gwendolyn with an iron fist and hours-long meetings filled with souped-up PowerPoint presentations.
Although the drunken supermarket escapade may fall flat, there are plenty of other scenes that succeed, and nearly all of them feature Hahn's Carla, some sort of over-the-top discussion, and alcohol. When the trio of Hahn, Kunis, and Bell are all there—and given appropriately foolish material—they make Bad Moms sing.
As indicated though, all is not perfect. Part of the problem stems from Bad Moms' inability to make a decision about what sort of film it wants to be – does it want to operate in our world and offer real lessons about life and the difficulties of parenting, or does it want to operate in some magical world that only vaguely resembles ours? The movie constantly switches back-and-forth between the two, doing things like having a serious reconciliation attempt between Amy and Mike one moment and then deciding to play a therapy session, with Wanda Sykes appearing as their marriage counselor, entirely for laughs. The session is funny, but the constant shifting of gears is jarring.
Much better is Amy's search for new love and potentially finding it with a widowed father, Jessie (Jay Hernandez). The moments between the two characters, and with Amy getting help from Carla and Kiki for a night on the town, may be predictable, but the punch lines are funny and the actors sell it. The romance portion of the story, unfortunately, takes a backseat to other issues but when it's on screen it is wholly enjoyable.
To be clear, Kunis and company don't only manage to succeed with much of the comedy, they succeed with the more serious moments as well. Amy's speech prior to the PTA election does in fact highlight many of the difficulties with being a parent in this day and age and her argument about what it means to be a bad mom is wise, but those moments don't gel with some of the silliness that comes before and after.
Non-parents in the audience may very well take issue with the film's entire woe-is-me take on parenting, and there is certainly a case for that. Bad Moms is entirely about a group of upper-middle class individuals complaining that while they have so much, they want more and/or different. While the movie regularly is able to make the conversation about big, real things, there is an unshakable sense that some of their distress is self-manufactured and something that could be easily avoided with a modicum of care. That is, stress over doing your child's time-consuming homework can be deftly avoided by not doing your child's homework.
The Verdict
Bad Moms is not always as funny as it ought to be, nor is it always able to hit the serious moments at which it aims. What it is able to do is be relatively funny for much of its runtime. It offers a great cast who—even if they're playing the baddies—are likable and it has a bunch of solid cameos as well. The uneven tone is a problem, but it's something that everyone on screen does their best to overcome.
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