Mother’s Day

A rather underwhelming remake, Mother’s Day follows several criminals (including Patrick John Flueger’s Ike, Deborah Ann Woll’s Lydia, and Rebecca De Mornay’s Natalie) as they attempt to recover a cache of money that’s hidden somewhere in the house they once owned – with the movie subsequently detailing the battle of wills that ensues between said criminals and the house’s current residents (and their friends). Filmmaker Darren Lynn Bousman kicks Mother’s Day off with an impressively engrossing opening centered around the aforementioned home invasion, with the brutality and lightning-fast pace of this stretch establishing a promising atmosphere of no-holds-barred horror. The slow-but-steady segue into a progressively meandering midsection puts a palpable damper on the movie’s propulsive feel, as Bousman, working from Scott Milam’s screenplay, has peppered the narrative with elements that could (and should) have been excised from the final product. The inclusion of a few admittedly striking sequences – eg a cat-and-mouse chase through a dry-cleaning shop – is simply not enough to compensate for the otherwise uneventful and padded-out vibe, and it doesn’t help, either, that Milam places an increasingly prominent emphasis on elements of an almost eye-rollingly conventional nature (eg the various mind games that inevitably ensue between the characters). It is, in the end, difficult to recall a horror effort that has so completely squandered the promise of its initial setup, and it’s clear that the film, saddled with a 112 minute (!) running time, simply had no shot at overcoming its egregiously bloated atmosphere.

*1/2 out of ****