Mother's Day movie review & film summary (2016)

This is the third film in a row from director Garry Marshall to combine a beloved holiday, multiple storylines, and casts combining large chunks of the current SAG roster, into something resembling a cross between “The Cannonball Run” and an entire season of “Love, American Style.” I must admit to sort of liking the first one, “Valentine’s Day” (2010), if only because I found it impossible to resist any film that included the likes of Jessica Alba, Anne Hathaway, Shirley MacLaine and Taylor Swift. “New Year’s Eve” (2011), on the other hand, was as ghastly and bloated as the day it commemorated and featured an even larger cast of notables (including Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi) making fools of themselves. By comparison, “Mother’s Day” dials down the star factor somewhat—a mistake since without the “Hey, isn’t that ... ?” factor to serve as a distraction, it leaves viewers with more time to concentrate on the script. This is not the kind of film where you want to be doing that too much.

This time around, the characters include Sandy (Jennifer Aniston), whose picture-perfect divorce is threatened when her former husband (Timothy Olyphant) unexpectedly marries his much-younger girlfriend Tina (Shay Mitchell) and tries to include her in the lives of their two young sons. She is friends with Jessie (Kate Hudson) and Gabi (Sarah Chalke), who have both moved far away from their trailer trash parents (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine) and are both keeping secrets from them—Jessie is married to an Indian man named Russell (Aasif Mandvi) and has a son with him (named Tanner, yuk yuk yuk) and Gabi is married to a woman (Cameron Esposito) and has a son with her as well. Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) is the hapless father to two daughters who is still reeling from the death of his wife nearly a year earlier. Meanwhile, Kristin (Britt Robertson) is a young mother who doesn’t want to marry her long-time boyfriend (Jack Whitehall), not because he is a bad stand-up comedian but because she has abandonment issues stemming from having been adopted. Finally, Miranda (Julia Roberts) is a host of a home shopping show who has no family to speak of because of her career goals, so there is obviously no way that she could be connected with any of the previously mentioned characters, so put that thought out of your mind right now.

In the past, it has been suggested that Garry Marshall does not make film for the supposedly refined palates of critics—he specializes in broad entertainment for mass audiences who are not necessarily in the mood for subtlety and introspection. This is not necessarily true—besides “Valentine’s Day,” I have enjoyed several of his past films. However, when he goes wrong, he can go spectacularly wrong (as anyone who sat through the inexplicable “Exit to Eden” and “The Other Sister” can attest) and “Mother’s Day” is as wrong as anything that he has ever done. He and the four screenwriters (three of them newcomers and the other the scribe of the deathless “Monster-in-Law”) have put their heads together to concoct a script that juggles far too many characters and plot lines. They neglect to include any moments of genuine insight about motherhood, or much of anything else for that matter.