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Movie Review: 'A Bad Moms Christmas'

Raunchy Mom-Com Mediocre at Best

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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A Bad Moms Christmas is quite funny. The gags delivered by these very funny ladies work most of the time to great effect. So why don’t I love the movie? As much as I laughed at A Bad Mom’s Christmas, I was rolling my eyes during scenes that weren’t centered on off-color gags. For all the uproarious laughs brought on by the brilliant Kathryn Hahn, the non-gag scenes, the ones centered on moving forward the supposed plot of A Bad Moms Christmas, simply don’t hold up.

Mila Kunis is once again at the center of the Bad Moms universe as Amy, the put-upon single mom to two adorable teenagers. Amy is fretting about Christmas and the pressures that the holiday specifically puts on moms to make everything perfect. Amy’s perfect Christmas would be vegging out and watching Love Actually with her kids and her boyfriend Jesse (Jay Hernandez) and his daughter but that’s not going to happen.

Amy’s mom, Ruth (Christine Baransky), has decided to crash Christmas this year and she has big plans for her daughter’s Christmas. Ruth is Christmas crazy and she immediately throws her daughter’s Christmas plans for a loop. In need of solace, Amy turns to her fellow Bad Moms, Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) who agree to help her take back Christmas, Bad Moms-style. This leads to a hit and miss montage of the trio creating havoc at the mall but the laughs outnumber the awkward moments, just barely.

Unfortunately for Kiki and Carla their own mothers have decided to visit. Kiki’s mom Sandy (Cheryl Hines) is a sweetheart but she has severe boundary issues. A big gag has mom watching her daughter begin to have sex with her husband before revealing that she’s in the room. Carla’s mom, Isis (Susan Sarandon) meanwhile, doesn’t even realize it’s Christmas when she drops in. Isis needs some cash to fund her gambling habit and is seeking a loan from her only daughter.

Hahn and Surandon create the only believable dynamic in the movie as Baranski and Hines are far too unplugged from reality for their plots to take hold in a believable fashion. Both actresses give it their all and both are given a couple of good gags in the movie but as Baranski especially is supposed to root the plot in something moderately dramatic, the character is a failure. The problems that arise are easily and predictably resolved. As for Hines, at the very least her character remains consistently nutty through the rest of the film, rendering her as amusing but not the least believable as a human character.

Hahn and Sarandon however, could take their show on the road. Though a little awkward with the really raunchy stuff, especially compared to Hahn, Sarandon is very game and works for every laugh. Hahn, on the other hand, could not be any more of a natural. Hahn’s delivery of some of the film’s most outré material is wildly hysterical. A scene where a male stripper comes to get work done at her hair removal business is an absolute raunchy goldmine of R-Rated laughs.

For a movie like A Bad Moms Christmas to work as something more than a few good gags, it needs a dramatic core, something that is more than just a hanger on which to hang a few joke premises. The original The Hangover, for instance, had a much stronger clothesline for R-rated gags in the boys’ search for their friend Doug. Everything that stemmed from Doug being missing made sense in the context of this desperate search for Doug.

The clothesline for A Bad Moms Christmas is faulty at best because the central conflict between Amy and her mother is so easily resolved. There is nothing at stake and thus the film has no center. That said, yes, there are more than enough laughs to justify the price of a ticket but the laughs are often cheap and forgettable and not the kind that makes a film series relevant or memorable. This is throwaway material and that will be satisfying enough for some but for me, it’s only just above mediocre. This is the C+ student of raunchy comedies.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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