film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
Has a verve rare in big-budget movies at the moment. Fun and fresh and legitimately engages with its source material on the levels of story, visuals, and mythology all at once. It feels like discovering storytelling anew.
This rushed sequel is an insult to its progenitor movie. A cheap knockoff that doesn’t understand what made Bad Moms so smart, funny, and feminist-wise.
The ending might have worked going to grandma’s house once upon a time, but it doesn’t work in 2015.
Over the river and through the woods to yet another banal, anticlimactic attempt at storytelling from M. Night Shyamalan. And this time, it’s found-footage.
Reason No. 34,075 to legalize drugs: it would eliminate painfully unfunny comedies like this one. Comedy shouldn’t make you pity the comedians.
I’d really like to give writer-director James L. Brooks the benefit of the doubt here, because I think — as I usually don’t about asinine romantic comedies — that he means well. He simply doesn’t seem to realize that pathologically messed up characters are neither cute nor charming.
It’s possible that this appallingly awful excuse for a raunchy comedy is meant to be satirical, but I suspect it’s merely shockingly incompetent, even grading on the raunchy-comedy curve.
