The Mother is the 2023 Netflix action thriller directed by Niki Caro, starring Jennifer Lopez as an unnamed, military-trained assassin who emerges from hiding to protect the daughter she gave up at birth from a pair of dangerous ex-associates, played by Joseph Fiennes and Gael García Bernal. Much of it unfolds against the wilderness of Alaska, where the Mother trains her daughter Zoe in survival and sniper skills. It is, in essence, a gender-flipped retread of a dozen better action films, and I had a genuinely painful time with it.

Let me start with the broader question the film left me asking: at what point, as a collective, do we agree to stop handing Jennifer Lopez action vehicles like this one? This is not a knock on her stardom — it's a plea for better material. Because The Mother gives her almost nothing to work with beyond clichés, and the result is a film that's both generic and weirdly exhausting.

Let's catalogue the issues. First, the most distracting: the Mother endures a two-hour gauntlet of running, fighting, motorbike chases, and sniper warfare, and her hair remains immaculate throughout. Not one strand out of place. It's a small thing, but it perfectly encapsulates the film's complete disinterest in believability. Speaking of which, there's a sequence where she swings Zoe onto a moving motorbike at considerable speed, without stopping or even slowing down — a moment so physically implausible it pulled me straight out of the film.

Then there's the running itself, which became an unintentional comedy highlight. Every time the film called for Lopez to move faster than a brisk walk, the result was distractingly awkward — less elite assassin, more Phoebe from Friends jogging through the park. For a film leaning so heavily on its star's physicality, that's a problem.

The daughter, Zoe, is written to be so relentlessly annoying that I found myself, at multiple points, quietly siding with the villains. When a film makes you root for the kidnappers to succeed simply to end the bickering, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the character work.

And then there's the symbolism. The film deploys an extended wolf-and-cubs metaphor — the wounded mother wolf fiercely protecting her young and surviving against the odds, mirroring the Mother and Zoe — and it's handled with all the grace of a high school theatre student who has just discovered metaphor and is desperate to show everyone. It's heavy-handed to the point of self-parody.

At nearly two hours, the film felt considerably longer, and by the end I was genuinely bothered by how much the whole experience had bothered me. The one redeeming quality? Alaska looks beautiful. The landscapes are genuinely gorgeous, and the film has single-handedly made me want to plan a trip there. That is the entirety of the praise I can muster.