The star’s new action movie hits Netflix the same day that husband Ben Affleck’s ‘Air’ lands on Prime Video. The French supernatural drama ‘The Five Devils’ brings a different maternal dynamic on Mubi.
Jennifer Lopez plays a classic “hero with no name”-type in “The Mother,” a revenge thriller in which her character is an underworld assassin trained by the U.S. military. In the movie’s opening sequence, the heavily pregnant heroine reluctantly cooperates with the FBI on an operation that goes horribly awry. She delivers her baby prematurely and is persuaded by the government to give the child up for adoption and go into hiding. But 12 years later, the Mother gets word from a trusted FBI source (Omari Hardwick) that her daughter, Zoe (Lucy Paez), is being targeted by some of her bitterest enemies — a ruthless ex-boss (Joseph Fiennes) and a sadistic gun runner (Gael Garcia Bernal).
“The Mother” is ostensibly an action movie, though Lopez (who is also a producer on this film) and director Niki Caro include plenty of quieter scenes of maternal bonding amid all the chases and shootouts in Misha Green’s script (co-written with Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig). To keep Zoe safe, the Mother takes her deep into the snowy wilderness to teach her survival skills. The pair warm to each other as they work on tracking and shooting.
Caro — best-known for the Oscar-nominated “Whale Rider” and “North Country” — effectively contrasts the open landscapes of the Mother’s hideaway with the constrictions of the parking garages, hallways, city streets and cluttered crime lairs where she plies her trade. The basic contours of this story are well worn (flip the main character’s gender and this could easily be a Liam Neeson picture). And the stakes are generic with a vague concept of “motherhood” as the heroine’s main objective. But from scene to scene, Lopez and Caro do fill these broad outlines with real feeling, bringing a personal touch to old pulp archetypes.
