Movie Review: Mothers Day

If Henry Ford ever got into the movie business he would have thought of the idea behind a movie like Mothers Day and for that matter Valentines Day and New Years Eve which were all directed by Gary Marshall. The idea behind this seems to be: what does it matter that we have scheduling conflicts with big stars who we know in advance would have an automatic draw at the box office? We can hire big box office stars for a few weeks and hand them a big payday for a short period of time. Why wait for a year or more to write a great script when in a few weeks we can write about 5 or 6 small stories and over the period of 2 hours try and connect some of the stories together later. The real point of this project is to bring in the audience because we have several big stars that come with their own fans who will pay to see them. What sense is the quality of a great story against a big box office? This strategy has spawned three movies of this type by Gary Marshall since 2010 that have been mostly panned by the critics and should for the most part never been made.

In the new film "Mothers Day", Jennifer Anniston, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis and Julia Roberts are all in 4 completely different and in some cases loosely connected stories which all in some ways involve mothers or Mothers Day which is the last day in the movie. None of these stories by themselves would be engaging enough to warrant a 2 hour movie, but the producers thought that if all 4 of the stories were in the same movie and at times connected then we can get away with 4 weak stories and produce a money making movie faster and cheaper than we could have otherwise. This is clearly what Henry Ford had in mind when he invented the concept of the assembly line to make cars. Create things in small pieces and then put it all together later. This works tremendously for making cars, but not so well for making a high-quality movie with a great story.

At the end of this two-hour experience and researching this movie I came to two realizations: #1 was despite the cookie-cutter assembly line idea in "Mothers Day" it was not that bad overall and #2 was that for some reason the actor Hector Elizondo is in almost all of the movies Gary Marshall has ever made. Due to the lack of a real movie here I cannot recommend Mothers Day, but you may want to see it if you are a big fan of the 4 stars involved, which was the exact point of making this movie in the first place.





Mothers Day - IMDB