I'm not going to spend much time crapping on this movie. Yes, it's not very good. The biggest part of the problem is the jokes are all really predictable and ridiculous. I don't find this kind of humour very satisfying, the kind of jokes which just push all sense of realism to the side. It just stops being funny for me when I see someone doing something so completely unrealistic. The basic gimmick of the film is how each of our "bad moms" has their own bad mom show up and act horribly. They don't even act remotely like a real bad mom would act. They just act ridiculous. And I just don't find that very funny.
But I went in expecting that so I put it aside and just tried to enjoy the main plot, the idea that our expectations for the holidays set an impossible standard to live up to which sucks all the joy out of it. There is something about that I respond to. I liked that the movie tried to get there, even if it does it by being as silly as possible. So as it careened obviously towards it's silly sentimental conclusion, by being as rude as possible to make it seem too cool for sentimentality, I lost any hope it would bring any actual insight into the difficult relationships within families that manifests over the holidays in our consumerist culture, and just realized it was going to feed us all the expected jokes and tropes that we get year after year in movies like this.
So in the spirit of the season I'll give it a pass and just enjoy the few rare moments the movie made me chuckle. Most likely this won't be added to my list of holiday films I try to see each year, yeah it certainly won't but whatever. Merry Christmas bitches.
A Bad Moms Christmas
Starring: Mila Kunis, Kristin Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, Susan Sarandon
Writers/Directors: Scott Moore, Jon Lucas
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