"Bad Moms" May Not Be Worth the Hangover

Hangovers loom large in the films of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (21 & Over, The Change-Up, The Hangover). Not just actual ones, but the lingering haze as youthful passions awaken to the throbbing responsibilities of adulthood. Bad Moms opens on one of our titular heroines reciting her daily litany of First World problems. She works long hours for a startup, where she's taken for granted by millennial scatterbrains, and her shiftless husband sought out a cam model for a quasi-affair. Motherhood doesn't complete her.

After one bad day's accumulated frustrations force Amy (Mila Kunis) to flee a glorious marriage, job and the PTA, she forms a booze-drenched MILF pack with slatternly Carla (Kathryn Hahn) and wallflower Kiki (Kristen Bell). Cue the inexplicably raucous party, supermarket-destruction montage, dreamy young widower (Jay Hernandez) and chief antagonist (Christina Applegate as supermom Gwendolyn). It's a simple formula, one that Lucas and Moore unfold briskly by sacrificing storyline for the sake of left-field guest stars (Wanda Sykes, J.J. Watt) and one-liners.

Lucas and Moore's central thesis is not, as Kunis trills during a PTA speech, that all moms are bad on occasion. Instead, the filmmakers argue that no moms are always good, which isn't quite the same thing. Like The Hangover, which didn't so much praise marriage as tar bachelorhood and bro-life idylls, Bad Moms highlights the inevitable downsides of parenting to make everything above minimal parental effort seem comically pretentious. When helicoptering doesn't work, why clean the rotors?

It is bleak worldview, to be sure, and also a damnably effective means of forestalling critique. The film so completely ignores genre format—the character arcs read like seismographs—that we're hardly surprised when Bell reshapes her marriage with a single phone call and Applegate redeems herself by whisking her new friends away to Paris to go shopping. The film simplifies human choices to animalistic instinct. Sudden, 180-degree life changes seem like afterthoughts. The film rides on appealing actors tossing non sequiturs back and forth in a series of wish-fulfillment scenarios. When confronted with such fundamental emptiness of vision, there's little sense getting angry. We're just very, very disappointed.

Critic's Grade: C

SEE IT: Bad Moms is rated R. It opens Friday at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Pioneer Place, Tigard.

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