Like so many high-concept movies, Mom and Dad is an idea in search of a story. But while a risky failure like Alexander Payne's Downsizing flounders in its attempt to craft some kind of narrative, director Brian Taylor just abandons conventional storytelling entirely in his bloody and satirical horror hybrid. The result is an 83 minute film that never gels in any significant way, only serving to deliver a few shocks to unsuspecting audiences. It rolls out intermittently amusing, often obnoxious action scenes for much of its runtime, feeling completely bonkers while never managing to be controlled or effective. Not especially funny or scary, Mom and Dad amounts to a whole lot of nothing. Nicolas Cage tries to murder his children, but sadly, that isn't nearly as entertaining as it sounds.
The Ryan clan is your average, everyday nuclear family. Brent (Cage) is going through a particularly brutal midlife crisis, while his wife, Kendall (Selma Blair), is trying (and failing) to make it back into the workplace. They have two great kids, Carly (Anne Winters) and Josh (Zackary Arthur), yet they feel increasingly disconnected from them. Josh is still young enough to be attached to his parents, but Carly is growing up, preferring to spend more time with her boyfriend (Robert T. Cunningham). And then, out of nowhere, disaster strikes. Suddenly, all parents have a primal and uncontrollable urge to viciously murder their children. Nobody knows what caused this, but the news and authorities have ruled that it's an attack of some kind. With mayhem ensuing in the suburbs, Carly and Josh have to find a way to survive the carnage, outsmarting their bloodthirsty parents along the way.
As a psychological study of precisely why parents would snap and kill their kids, this story has the potential to actually be kind of clever and funny in an extremely dark way. It's no secret that kids drive their parents crazy, and this movie taps into that ever so slightly at a few distinct moments. But Brian Taylor, best known for co-directing the Crank movies and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, has no real interest in delving into the subtleties of his concept in an illuminating or terrifying manner. I would even say that I don't think he has any real interest in scaring his audience or deliberately making them laugh with incisive jokes. Taylor just thinks that this idea is so inherently amusing that it can carry the whole movie, and his strategy throughout Mom and Dad is to create pure mayhem.
And it works for a little while. The initial scenes of parents trying to rip their kids limb from limb feel anarchic and hysterical in a manner that recalls Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, and Taylor's hyper-kinetic style serves the movie well at times. Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair give their all to this film, and their balance of feverish rage and ice-cold precision generates some pretty good laughs. But Mom and Dad ultimately feels like an unsatisfying short film. I said this about Trey Edward Shults's It Comes at Night last year, but the context couldn't be more different. Dealing with ambiguity is like playing with fire, and as a filmmaker, you have to use it properly. Taylor has no interest in solving a mystery or telling a cohesive story, and by the time you realize this, it's impossible not to think of Mom and Dad as a deeply lazy film.
So essentially, you get 83 minutes of carnage and brutality, filmed in Taylor's jerky, intentionally disorienting style. It's trashy genre madness without a reason to exist. Mom and Dad's attempts to provide nuance and substance to its narrative ring false, and its truncated runtime only makes matters worse. It sounds brilliant on paper, but in the end, Mom and Dad is an empty, profoundly disappointing waste of a good idea.
THE FINAL GRADE: C- (5.2/10)
The Ryan clan is your average, everyday nuclear family. Brent (Cage) is going through a particularly brutal midlife crisis, while his wife, Kendall (Selma Blair), is trying (and failing) to make it back into the workplace. They have two great kids, Carly (Anne Winters) and Josh (Zackary Arthur), yet they feel increasingly disconnected from them. Josh is still young enough to be attached to his parents, but Carly is growing up, preferring to spend more time with her boyfriend (Robert T. Cunningham). And then, out of nowhere, disaster strikes. Suddenly, all parents have a primal and uncontrollable urge to viciously murder their children. Nobody knows what caused this, but the news and authorities have ruled that it's an attack of some kind. With mayhem ensuing in the suburbs, Carly and Josh have to find a way to survive the carnage, outsmarting their bloodthirsty parents along the way.
As a psychological study of precisely why parents would snap and kill their kids, this story has the potential to actually be kind of clever and funny in an extremely dark way. It's no secret that kids drive their parents crazy, and this movie taps into that ever so slightly at a few distinct moments. But Brian Taylor, best known for co-directing the Crank movies and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, has no real interest in delving into the subtleties of his concept in an illuminating or terrifying manner. I would even say that I don't think he has any real interest in scaring his audience or deliberately making them laugh with incisive jokes. Taylor just thinks that this idea is so inherently amusing that it can carry the whole movie, and his strategy throughout Mom and Dad is to create pure mayhem.
And it works for a little while. The initial scenes of parents trying to rip their kids limb from limb feel anarchic and hysterical in a manner that recalls Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, and Taylor's hyper-kinetic style serves the movie well at times. Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair give their all to this film, and their balance of feverish rage and ice-cold precision generates some pretty good laughs. But Mom and Dad ultimately feels like an unsatisfying short film. I said this about Trey Edward Shults's It Comes at Night last year, but the context couldn't be more different. Dealing with ambiguity is like playing with fire, and as a filmmaker, you have to use it properly. Taylor has no interest in solving a mystery or telling a cohesive story, and by the time you realize this, it's impossible not to think of Mom and Dad as a deeply lazy film.
So essentially, you get 83 minutes of carnage and brutality, filmed in Taylor's jerky, intentionally disorienting style. It's trashy genre madness without a reason to exist. Mom and Dad's attempts to provide nuance and substance to its narrative ring false, and its truncated runtime only makes matters worse. It sounds brilliant on paper, but in the end, Mom and Dad is an empty, profoundly disappointing waste of a good idea.
THE FINAL GRADE: C- (5.2/10)
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