Review: ‘Bad Moms’ is exactly that: Bad

“Bad Moms” lives up to its title. The fed-up women in this R-rated matriarchy chug scotch and wine. They go wild on whippets. They have sex with hot widowers on the granite islands in their handsome appointed kitchens. There’s oral sex, masturbation, full-frontal nudity and an uncomfortably long, involved demonstration of sex with an uncircumcised penis using Kristen Bell in a hoodie as a prop.

But beneath that patina of penis jokes and four-letter words beats a weak and sentimental heart that fails to deliver the film’s promise of raucous fun, instead wasting a talented cast of comediennes on cliche platitudes on motherhood.

It’s not the moms that are bad — it’s the movie.

The main mom is Amy (Mila Kunis), who looks the picture of polished perfection as she bemoans her harried life in voice-over. She’s 32 and has two middle-school-aged children. Her husband, a seeming idiot man-child who likely can’t tie his own shoes, doesn’t contribute his fair share around the house. And she’s overworked and underpaid at the independent coffee company she works for. Her chief stress, though, is the PTA at her kids’ school and its demanding mean-girl president Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate), a rich blond WASP who uses her power to punish lesser mothers.

It’s life at its disappointing usual until Amy catches her doltish husband diddling himself to a woman online. She kicks him out, kicks off her shoes, showily quits the PTA and dives headlong into making up for the 20s she lost to early motherhood. Along for the ride are Carla (Kathryn Hahn), a (sometimes hilariously) vulgar single mother with few inhibitions; and Kiki (Bell), a repressed stay-at-home mother in a domineering marriage.

“Screw it,” Amy says, launching into her rallying cry. “Let’s be bad moms!”

“Bad Moms” is the kind of movie that happens when all the women are in front of the camera, and men are at the writer’s table and in the director’s chair. It was penned and directed by filmmaking duo Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the writers behind boys-gone-wild lunacy of “The Hangover.” There is little authenticity and much cliche in their portrayal of motherhood and its attendant joys and hardships.

The only real glimpse we get into the rich inner lives of women, for either laughs or feels, is when the movie ends, before the credits role, in snippets of interviews with the cast members and their real-life moms. They bicker, they laugh, they share personal anecdotes. And it’s more humorous, more charming, more charismatic and more real than anything that happens in the movie proper.

REVIEW

‘BAD MOMS’

A raunchy yet still boring comedy about middle-class moms gone wild, as written by men. An unfunny disappointment. R. 101 minutes.