After 104 laugh-free, contrived, lazy minutes, A Bad Moms Christmas ends the only way it can: A choreographed dance scene. Of course it does.
Mind you, the characters (or what passes for characters in this dreck) aren’t at a party or a club or anywhere else where dancing could organically occur. No, they’re in an out-of-universe, white background, like something from a Thomas Kinkade painting. Everyone’s laughing and awkwardly shaking their hips and pretending they enjoy each other’s company. It’s like you’ve caught the actors at the most splendid Christmas party. What a magical scene. What a wonderful moment. What a load of crap.
It’s an old Hollywood trick. Whenever you’ve subjected an audience to cinematic torture, you need to send them home happy. You need to show them something fun and cute so they can convince themselves that they watched a good movie instead of an assault on the eyes. Back in the day, this would involve a quick montage of bloopers or deleted scenes. Nowadays, thanks to the Smash Mouth song at the end of Shrek (everything is Smash Mouth’s fault, somehow), crappy movies close out with peppy dance numbers. It’s a subliminal attempt to make you forget the garbage you just witnessed.
But no amount of dancing, smiling, or forced frivolity can make A Bad Moms Christmas a good movie. And the fact this film closes out with the actors laughing in the audience’s face only adds insult to injury.
Full disclosure: I never saw the original Bad Moms (back in the far-off year of 2016), so I’m not sure how Moms Christmas functions as a sequel. Based on the dialogue in this movie, I gathered that the last film was about a cabal of frustrated mothers who seized the USA’s nuclear codes and subjected the country to their hedonistic wims, only to surrender their power for the sake of family. Or something like that. Maybe I’m wrong. I could’ve missed something. It’s hard to pay attention to this film.
Mila Kunis plays Narrator Mom, who’s stressed out because her judgmental mom (the always excellent Christine Baranski) is staying over for the holidays. Kristen Bell’s Bland Mom is stressed out because her clingy mom (Cheryl Hines) is staying for the holidays. And Kathryn Hahn’s Party Mom is too “radical” to be stressed out, since her cool mom (Susan Sarandon) is staying for the holidays. Were those sentences a bit repetitive? Well, so is the movie.
It’s a very basic Christmas story, one that’s churned out every year in countless television sitcoms. Kunis wants a simple Christmas, Baranski wants a lavish party, they bicker, a compromise is reached, an overplayed holiday song plays, the end.
But you know what can redeem a shallow, cliched plot? Laughs. Comedies can be formulaic or dumb or empty, as long as they’re funny. That’s all that matters. Bad Moms Christmas made me smile, at most, four times. Your mileage may vary.
I’ll be honest: I despise these kinds of comedies. They’re films that possess zero cinematic flair. They cater exclusively to the actors, filming everything in close-ups so we don’t get distracted by anything else. The cinematography is kept bland and flat so the focus is always on the actors. It’s great for their egos, but not for the films. We’ve been inundated with them ever since Judd Apatow burst onto the scene. It’s gutless filmmaking.
Moms Christmas builds no jokes with visuals or clever editing. It doesn’t create set-ups and payoffs. It doesn’t take advantage of cinema’s unique comedic potential. It just films its actors talking. And that gets boring really quick. If you want to see what I’m talking about, watch a Seth Rogen movie, and then watch an Edgar Wright movie. You’ll spot the difference.
I could even forgive that cinematic laziness if the actors’ words were funny, but they’re simply not. It’s boilerplate “contemporary” dialogue with a generous sprinkling of f-bombs. Most of the dialogue would be rejected from a sub-standard improv troupe. There are no punchlines; just dumb lines.
The cast is the lone highlight. Besides Mila “Charisma Vacuum” Kunis, the cast is quite talented, especially the phenomenally awkward Peter Gallagher. Sarandon, Hines, and Baranski have decent chemistry in their scenes together. Nobody has anything interesting or funny to do, but they try their best. And it looks like they enjoyed themselves making this movie. At least somebody got a bit of satisfaction out of this lump of cinematic coal.
