My Review of "Ma"

Ma came out in 2019 and it seemed like a very interesting movie. I unfortunately didn't get to see the movie until now. It turned out to be the movie that I kind of expected it was going to be. That's not necessarily a bad thing either. It's an interesting yet predictable movie that people can get behind. They added a few sprinkles of social commentary and made a pretty decent movie.

This movie starts out with a new girl named Maggie. She's recently moved to this small town that her mother grew up in. Their family has recently fallen under hard times. Her father had separated from her mother and her mother is starting her life a new. Maggie is a pretty good kid. She follows what her mom tells her to do and generally has a good understanding of what's good and bad.

Of course high school is high school and kids kind of do dumb things when they're under the influence of social pressures. Maggie befriends some of the cool kids at school. They want Maggie to join her while they get intoxicated and spend their time partying with one another. In this group happens to be a boy that Maggie has taken a liking to so she agrees to join them.

As these kids are too young to buy alcohol they need an adult to buy alcohol for them. So they hang out at the local liquor store hoping for an adult to purchase some booze on their behalf. I found it kind of odd that they were able to purchase weed and cigarettes than they could get alcohol but that's not really what the story is about.

They eventually find this woman named Sue Ann that they nicknamed Ma. Ma is willing to purchase the liquor for the kids and in a turn of expectations she's also willing to host their drinking parties. She claims that she'd rather them be safe in her house than them drinking in the wilderness and possibly drive home drunk.

From the get go Ma seems kind of off but the kids disregard these cues because they're getting someone to buy them booze and hosting their parties. Kids are kids and you can see how they would fall for something like this. It's pretty much like a stranger offering a child candy but in this case it's young adults and alcohol.

As the movie goes on we start to see Ma's motivations and what her true intentions are. It's a small town and everything makes sense in the end. Even the kids falling for the Ma's tricks was kind of understandable. They could only have made this movie with young adults because the naivety and innocence of these kids is clearly the key to keeping the movie going. I understood why they would fall for these tricks and not too many movies do this very convincingly. It was pretty well thought out.

There's a few twists and turns but nothing to really get you scratching your head. I think it's mainly because it's pretty predictable. That's one of the downfalls of the movie too. The predictability removed a lot of the anticipation and the supposed horror that this movie was trying to implement. At no point was I absolutely scared for our heroes. For some reason I thought everything was going to be okay throughout the movie. Or at least I knew what was going to happen and there was no real suspense to what was going to happen.

Still I thought the characters were pretty well developed. I liked how they fleshed out a lot of them to be more than just one dimensional characters. These characters more than made up for the movie. I was more intrigued with these characters than I was with the plot twists and the suspense that was supposed to come with it.

Overall, I had a great time with this one. The characters kept me drawn to the movie but the actual storyline of the movie was a bit predictable and flat. It's still an okay movie and worth a trip. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. I would say watch this if you need a somewhat suspenseful movie but don't get your hopes up for it being too suspenseful. It's not scary either.