Review: Bad Moms

30ish mum Mila Kunis finds out her husband has been having an online affair. The mum of two (including young Oona Laurence) finds sympathy from other mums at her kids’ school like Kathryn Hahn and Kristen Bell. They’re all fed up with ‘adulting’ (to use the modern parlance, not quoting the film directly) and decide to let their hair down and get cray-cray (OK, I’ll stop now), or at least the male screenwriting duo’s imagination of what that would be like. Christina Applegate plays a super-ambitious mother and PTA president who has it out for the trio of mums and their kids. Jada Pinkett-Smith plays Applegate’s Yes-Woman. Jay Hernandez plays a hunk, Clark Duke is Kunis’ creepy boss, and Martha Stewart turns up as herself.

If ever there was a film made for me, this 2016 motherly version of “The Hangover” from co-directors/co-writers Jon Lucas & Scott Moore is…the opposite of that film. I loathe the “Hangover” films (Lucas and Moore wrote the first one) and adding oestrogen and motherhood to the mix does less than zero for me. I don’t like parties nor drink alcohol, and as was the case with “Sisters”, watching a bunch of grown women do their own version of the arrested development “Hangover” thing is just not appealing or relatable to me in any way at all. Add creepy Clark Duke doing creepy Clark Duke things, and I was never gonna have any fun with this. I only watched it on the advice of a loved one…who clearly has different taste in movies to me. If you’re a mum, I have no doubt you’ll relate to at least something here, though I’d be surprised if anyone genuinely loves this film.

For me, I only liked three things: 1) A genuinely well-timed bit of physical comedy involving accidentally clunked heads, 2) Wanda Sykes in a cameo as a marriage counsellor, and 3) The end credits where the lead actresses and their real-life mothers reminisce. It’s cute. The rest…oof, it was a slog. I did think it was cute that Christina Applegate has a plan to make kids go to school 365 days a year an even invokes Genghis Khan and Osama Bin Laden to ‘prove’ her point. Look, it’s a struggle to find positives here, OK? I’m really trying.

The adult characters here are largely disgusting, the humour stupid and slapstick-y, and when Kunis’ amazingly well-adjusted daughter (played by the lovely Oona Laurence) finally shames her mother on her idiotic arrested development behaviour…I don’t think I was meant to be cheering the girl on. But I was. 20 minutes in and the drinking and partying began, and my heart well and truly sank. I really didn’t get it. Its departure from reality was evident even to someone like me who is so very much the polar opposite of these characters. Even the swearing was so excessive so as to be unconvincing and forced. I love swearing, when it’s used appropriately. I also found, comedy or not, that the film’s view of uncircumcised penises was absolutely objectionable. It’s neither funny nor necessary. Aside from Laurence, the best I can say for the cast is that Mila Kunis is…OK, despite being miscast as someone who wears an unflattering ‘mom bra’ that she refers to as her ‘sexy bra’. Even the usually amusing Christina Applegate and Kathryn Hahn are ghastly and caricatured in this, whilst Jada Pinkett-Smith seems to have just turned up on set without being written into the film. She’s basically relegated to being the person who says ‘Daaaaaaaaaamn!’ a lot. Yeah, that’s not a cultural cliché at all, is it? Why not get her to do the finger wag/head wobble combo while you’re at it? Poor Kristen Bell plays a character that is so sad to an overdone degree where you can’t even sympathise with her. I actually think she would’ve been perfect in the Kunis role, if anything. No one plays an actual human being in this, except young Laurence, whilst the men are either hunky himbos or losers. That simply isn’t fair, nor realistic (even for a silly comedy).

Although there’s a definite market for this film, and though it probably serves more of a purpose than any of the “Hangover” films, I cannot abide this film. I wanted to champion this film’s basic message, but I cannot based on the resulting output. Mums are truly amazing and don’t get enough credit, however these characters are creepy and sad. This is desperate, almost entirely unfunny and unlikeable stuff that was clearly not made with me in mind. That’s fine. You may like it, I did not.

Rating: C-