You probably don’t know the names Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. That’s because these writers-for-hire have penned some of the most barrel-scraping comedies of the past 12 years, the sort of movies you wouldn’t even watch on a 14-hour flight: The Martin Lawrence vehicle Rebound, the Yuletide stink-bomb Four Christmases, the bro-tastic romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, the trading-places fantasy The Change-Up … and their lone box-office smash The Hangover, the most overrated trendsetter of the decade.
It’s in the lowbrow, hard-R style of the latter film that they’ve given us Bad Moms, a gender-reversed trash-com conceived, like Adam’s rib, from The Hangover’s sticky DNA. Directing for the first time, as well as co-writing, Lucas and Moore have created an inarticulate product devoid of recognizable human behavior, that strives for envelope-pushing provocation but lands with a flaccid thud, that recycles clichés long sequestered to the realm of ironic parody and presents them sincerely.
It’s yet another epic waste of time for the lovely and (we can only assume) talented Mila Kunis, whose body of work is only slightly more desirable than a weekend with the Zika virus. Her character, Amy, is a harried supermom woefully balancing the parenting duties of her two spoiled young children with a nondescript job at a hipster coffee-roasting joint. At home, she cooks, cleans and coddles her infantile husband Mike (David Walton), a lazy broker who, we soon learn, has been e-cheating on Amy with a webcam mistress for the past 10 months.
Between one kid’s soccer practice and the other’s science project, between soul-numbing PTA meetings and an uninspiring job, between a pending separation and a suddenly sick dog, Amy’s life is a series of cascading calamities to which the writer-directors add injury to insult: Pretty soon, she clips another car in a hit-and-run, is tripped and toppled on a soccer field and spills her microwave lunch all over her business attire. We captured the essence of an overstressed life long before such italicized pratfalls, but Lucas and Moore are not ones for subtlety. They never resist the cheap joke, the easy punch line, the injudicious deployment of slow-motion to protract their character’s suffering, if you can even call it that: These are First World problems, after all.
It soon becomes apparent that Amy has had enough, deciding to throw the rules of proper motherhood into the proverbial dumpster, which is where Lucas and Moore spend the majority of their film. She befriends a pair of like-minded fed-up moms — the promiscuous, uncouth Carla (Kathryn Hahn) and the square tagalong Kiki (Kristen Bell) — who run roughshod over the former strictures of their lives: defiling supermarkets, picking up strangers at bars, partying until morning and forcing their kids to, God forbid, prepare their own breakfasts and do their own homework.
Bad Moms is rarely funny, its humor composed of shopworn visual gags and witless pop-culture references like “My husband totally 50 Shaded me this morning.” (A hilariously graphic description of sexual intercourse with an uncircumcised man is a rare exception that works.) But the film’s spirit of anarchic abandon would at least earn a modicum of respect if it stuck to its nihilistic ways through and through. But this nadir of women-behaving-badly comedies hides a saccharine core, expecting us to fall prostrate to its wholly unearned third-act sentiment.
Perhaps more than The Hangover, this is a film that owes its sorry origins to Bridesmaids, which opened the floodgates for estrogen-fueled ensemble raunch fests. But this wannabe is not worthy of laundering Bridesmaids’ puke-stained dresses. If anything, it succeeds in putting milder summer clunkers into new perspective: After this debacle, the fart jokes, wide-eyed mugging and “aw, hell no!” retorts of Ghostbusters don’t seem so bad.
BAD MOMS. Directors: Jon Lucas and Scott Moore; Cast: Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith, Annie Mumolo, Clark Duke, Wanda Sykes; Distributor: STX Entertainment; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters