We had a masterstroke of an idea to just copy and paste the ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ review here and replace the character names and actor names with those that starred in this film; technically the criticisms of the review would make perfect sense and the entire review would work smoothly, because both movies are IDENTICAL! But alas, we should do our duty and describe what flavor of awful this film was, right?
Well for starters what else could one really expect from a Christmas themed sequel of an already terrible comedy? Well apparently it’s possible to expect nothing and still get less. ‘A Bad Moms Christmas’ is directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore — it continues the story of the trio of women wanting to “reclaim” their “bad side” and take control of their lives. It’s almost insulting how shamelessly identical this film is to ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ and vice versa, all to the point where we’ve been racking our brains as to how this isn’t a blatant copy. In case you missed ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ here’s the rundown: some moms/dads are planning Christmas for their kids, their parents then show up, they fight about their upbringing, they make up, and that’s the end of the movie. This film had the personality and creativity of a rock, hell at least a rock is solid, it took every generic, bland, and tasteless note from every predictable trope it could find and stuffed it harder than a Christmas turkey.
We repeat, this story is so predictable that you practically describe the ending by the time you’re a quarter of the way through the film. There’s no doubt that this film was written in a way that would appease the vast majority of its target audience, in the end it’s not trying to be clever, anyone can figure that out; it’s trying to have just the right amount of humor, soft hearted moments, and filler dialogue so that it can sell to its audience, it just couldn’t lift its feet off the ground to draw out a moment of intrigue. Bad Moms is a bad movie, period.
We will however accept that the performances weren’t bad per se, they were more or less unremarkable. Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn return as the “bad moms”. The leader and general instigator of the group portrayed by Kunis is your standard mom and relatable character of the film; without offering too much personality Kunis plays her dull character well enough in the grand scheme of things. Kristen Bell plays the soft natured and bubbly blonde, she offers up what could be considered an appropriate performance for her character and we won’t judge too harshly considering the content that these actresses were working with was abysmal at best. We then have the sexually aggressive and trashy natured character portrayed by Kathryn Hahn, her role is the weakest of the film, she plays the same character in everything, just like Jillian Bell. The mothers of the mother’s were portrayed by Susan Sarandon and Christine Baranski – Baranski offers the best role in the film and is sole reason we are being generous with its scoring, her character at the very least has some semblance of a personality.
Structurally the film had below average pacing; of course the dialogue and story overshadowed this and resulted in it feeling like an eternity but we recognize that its overall structure had some degree of foundation — what didn’t have foundation was the films unceremoniously obnoxious montage sequences with ear-bleeding music that blared in the background, we counted five, that’s right… five terrible montages with five terrible songs scattered throughout a terrible movie.
On a positive note the production design was this film’s least terrible asset, while it was nothing but home interiors and the township we can concede that it offered decent colors and lighting. We are really struggling to find some real positives on a technical standpoint and it seems the sets were it.
Predictable character tropes, overused dialogue, and an uninspired storyline – A Bad Moms Christmas is yet another low effort comedy, in its purest form. All you really need to know is that this film works as a great example of how NOT to make a comedy. Booooo!
2.0/10
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