About twenty minutes into the new Netflix thriller “The Mother,” star Jennifer Lopez locks eyes with a snarling, angry wolf in the snowy Alaskan wilderness. Just as Lopez raises her rifle, a bunch of cute wolf babies emerge from their snowy home. The wolf stops growling and runs over to her babies. The wolf represents Lopez in a heavy-handed metaphor that acts as a through-line for the overly-long, utterly preposterous movie.
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Billed solely as “the Mother,” Lopez plays an ex-sharp shooter turned mercenary who flipped on her arms dealing boyfriends when she discovered they were also human trafficking. Lopez approaches the role with the same kind of stoicism as Alain Delon in “Le Samouraï” and the carnal vengeance of Liam Neeson in “Taken”. Unfortunately she’s hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires. 
We first meet her during an F.B.I. interrogation led by the affable William Cruise (Omari Hardwick, “Power”). After the safe house is violently raided by evil-ex #1 Adrian Lovell (played like a rejected Bond villain by Joseph Fiennes, “The Handmaid’s Tale”), a very pregnant Mother saves Cruise and fends off Lovell with a homemade bomb (or does she. . .), although not before he slices her belly with a knife. Once safely in the hospital, the Mother makes a deal to have her miraculously unharmed baby put into witness protection before she heads off to the aforementioned Alaskan wilderness. This is all in the first twelve minutes. 
The rest of the convoluted plot takes our heroine from Alaska to Cincinnati to Cuba and back to Alaska, after her now twelve-year-old daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) is kidnapped. Mischa Green (“Lovecraft Country”) is credited with the story, while she was joined on the screenplay by Andrea Berloff (“The Kitchen”) and Peter Craig (“The Town”). Somehow between the three of them they’ve crammed at least three movies worth of action – and, most regrettably, exposition – into two hours that truly feels more like four. 
Director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider,” “Mulan”) is out of her element with the film’s action sequences, which while fun, mostly feel like copies of a dozen other, better films. Her usual flare for great character work is handicapped by the film’s script, which relies largely on expositional dialogue to craft character motivations, rather than allowing for organic moments between actors. This clunky writing also detracts from her visual language, with many scenes overwrought with voiceover telling the audience what is happening, rather than letting the visuals speak for themselves. 
Oscar-nominee Paul Raci (“Sound of Metal”) is wasted as the Mother’s ex-brother-in-arms who helps her start her new life in Alaska. He’s at least got the grisled face of a real person and the gravitas to pull off any kind of character, even one so underwritten. I kept waiting for the script to ditch the exposition and give us one real moment between Jons and the Mother. One story that only they share. Something to make their deep friendship feel at all real. 
As evil-ex #2 Hector Álvarez, Gael Garcia Bernal (“Y tu mamá también”) is given an equally underwritten character. But like Raci, Bernal is an actor with such talent he’s able to do a lot with very little. Here he seems to have decided to go full soap opera villain, and while tonally it doesn’t mesh with the rest of the film, he’s at least a hoot to watch.
His sequence in Cuba is also the only wholly thrilling piece of filmmaking in the entire film. Again, operating in pure soap mode, the Mother has convinced the F.B.I. to let her go to Cuba with agent Cruise to extract her daughter. Shot a bit like a first person shooter video game and set to “Angel” by Massive Attack, the Mother’s neon green scope beautifully contrasts with the darkness as she picks off Álvarez’s protectors one by one. Eventually she finds Álvarez in a golden altar room filled with candles. Their reunion is a violent one, beautiful as it is gruesome. 
In fact, the whole film is filled with this style of gruesome hyperviolence. The Mother, we’re told, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, before becoming a guard at Guantanamo and later an arms dealer. In one scene she violently interrogates a man before brutally murdering him with a glass bottle. “You learn things in the service,” she says. Later explaining that she got into arms dealing because she had no family, no future, and despite being the best sniper in the service, the best she could expect when she got out was a job as a cashier. 
Somewhere in here there could have been an interesting commentary on the way the Army preys on the most vulnerable in society and turns them into unfeeling killing machines, then abandons them once they’re civilians again. However, it never fully commits to exploring that aspect of the Mother’s background. It also posits that although she has been turned into an unfeeling killing machine, because she’s a mother, all the violence she continues to perpetuate is justified. It so believes in this that in the third act the Mother begins training Zoe to use guns and knives as weapons “to protect herself.” She’s just a wolf teaching her offspring how to be a wolf. 
But in a country with such great gun violence perpetrated what seems like every day by children against children, this perpetuation of America’s unique fascination with gun violence dulls the metaphor. Instead, it continues to plant the insidious idea that the only way Americans can ever be safe is more guns. It’s bleak to see this idea packaged so soullessly as some sort of feminist empowerment. 
The film ends with the Mother watching Zoe from above, her protector. Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” – a song about childbirth originally written for the John Hughes film “She’s Having A Baby” – underscores the moment. Again, this is to instill the notion that this film is a feminist ode to the ferocity of motherhood. Yet, given Netflix’s part in Kate Bush’s renaissance due to a similar needle drop in the wildly popular Stranger Things last summer, it instead ends the film with the bitter aftertaste of another uniquely insidiously American trait: the soulless cash grab. [D]