The most difficult job on the planet is being a mother… at least that’s what Oprah Winfrey said, according to a joke I once heard Bill Burr tell. The everyday struggle of dealing with your kids can be an exhausting adventure.
You burn through gas picking them up from school every day, pretend to care about their feelings, cut into your booze money so you can feed them, and listen to their problems while they eventually ask you for bail. You make a long list of sacrifices just to be considered a “Good Mom.” But what if you wanted to be a “Bad Mom” for a change? What if you just wanted some me-time away from the kids so you could party like you’re twenty years too old to be partying? Well, you’re in luck, because Bad Moms exists specifically to address that fantasy—for women who are tired of raising kids, and pretty much only for them.
Our story begins with working mother Amy (Mila Kunis). Amy lives a busy, joyless existence as the parent of two kids. Every day she fixes their breakfast, does most of their homework, drives them to school, shows up at her part-time marketing job full of millennials, takes the dog to the vet, attends PTA meetings, cooks dinner for everyone, and still finds just enough time in her schedule to discover that her husband has been having an online affair for the last ten months. Amy finally decides enough is enough and no longer wants to be the model mother. She soon falls in with two other dysfunctional moms.
Kiki (Kristen Bell) is the stereotypical submissive house-slave whose entire life consists of taking mental and physical beatings from her four children. The third member of the trio is Carla (Kathryn Hahn), whose sole apparent purpose is to sleep with half the town and say the word “cock” for 101 straight minutes. And thank God for that, because without her this movie would be completely unwatchable.
Bad Moms exists in a heavily exaggerated universe where every character feels like they wandered out of an episode of The Big Bang Theory rather than real life. The children are walking hypochondriacs and selfish little monsters, the women are broad stereotypes, and the men would literally starve to death in under an hour if their wives weren’t around to feed them. Screenwriters (and directors) Jon Lucas and Scott Moore previously gave us The Hangover and 21 & Over, so it should surprise no one that the humor here is crude, vulgar, and frequently lazy. One extended five-minute gag has the three women discussing uncircumcised penises with almost no payoff beyond turning Kristen Bell into a prop. I’ve personally grown tired of this particular brand of comedy—what I’ve come to call the “Seth Rogen brand”—but I have to admit that Kathryn Hahn’s performance is the single thing that keeps the movie from collapsing.
While most of the scripted jokes are tired and miss more often than they hit, Hahn brings enough chaotic charm and apparent improvisation to generate real laughs. She gets bigger reactions with what feels like off-the-cuff material than anyone else does with the actual written lines.The film mostly revolves around Mila Kunis. You could reasonably argue she’s a bit young to be playing the mother of two middle-schoolers, but that’s a minor issue. Kunis is serviceable in the role, yet she never brings anything particularly inspired to a part that requires her to be the emotional and comedic center of the movie. She ends up feeling like a milder, less interesting version of her Family Guy persona and is frequently outshined by co-stars who have far less screen time.
Overall, Bad Moms plays like an R-rated episode of Modern Family—sitcom-level writing that strains as hard as it can to feel edgy. The ending is especially underwhelming. After spending most of the runtime building up Christina Applegate’s villainous PTA queen as a real obstacle, the movie takes the safest, softest possible exit. It also glosses over a number of basic logistical questions that keep pulling you out of the story: How does Amy afford her lifestyle working only a few part-time hours a week? How do her kids get home from school when she’s clearly drunk at a bar in the middle of the day?
How does a guy with no visible job afford to stay at the Waldorf for multiple nights? These aren’t nitpicks—they’re symptoms of a script that never bothered to think past the next dick joke.
Bad Moms is a deeply flawed comedy that wouldn’t even be worth a casual rental if not for one genuinely funny performance. Kathryn Hahn does heroic work trying to will this thing into entertainment, but she can only carry so much dead weight. Everyone else is stuck playing broad types in a movie that thinks volume and vulgarity are the same thing as wit.
1/5
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