Review

Mother's Day

Gabi (Sarah Chalke) and Jesse (Kate Hudson) reconnect with their estranged mother, Flo (Margo Martindale), in Mother’s Day, Garry Marshall’s latest romantic comedy.
Gabi (Sarah Chalke) and Jesse (Kate Hudson) reconnect with their estranged mother, Flo (Margo Martindale), in Mother’s Day, Garry Marshall’s latest romantic comedy.

After subjecting the world to Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve and now Mother' Day, it's easy to wish that Garry Marshall would make Arbor Day. Having forgotten how to make likable or even engaging human characters, it seems as if he might make a more enjoyable and dynamic movie about trees.

Marshall was once the mind behind sitcoms like Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days, and it seems as if he and a team of four credited co-screenwriters (Tom Hines, Lily Hollander, Anya Kochoff, Matthew Walker) have assembled Mother's Day from fragments of the scripts from those old shows. Worse, the film retains the sentiments in those sitcoms, which were set a couple of decades before they were made. Actually, they seem vibrant compared to what's on the big screen now. When characters under 50 discuss social networking as if it were nuclear physics, one starts to think the Fonz from Happy Days would be more at home in contemporary America.

Mother’s Day

72 Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts, Jason Sudeikis, Timothy Olyphant, Caleb Brown, Brandon Spink, Hector Elizondo, Britt Robertson, Jack Whitehall, Sarah Chalke, Cameron Esposito, Jennifer Garner

Director: Garry Marshall

Rating: PG-13, for language and some suggestive material

Running time: 118 minutes

Mother's Day is built around an ensemble of performers who apparently owe Marshall favors, like Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson and the omnipresent Hector Elizondo. The name "Marshall" keeps showing up all through the cast and crew list. Marshall even sticks sister Penny with a pointless opening voice-over. It's as though he's taking revenge on his friends and family.

Roberts plays a Home Shopping Network host, but her pitches for jewelry sound as if she's never seen the channel and look as if the actress was roped into the project just before she landed a better gig. Despite the presence of actual HSN personality Adam Freeman, the film feels more like an episode of the defunct Psychic Friends Club -- any alert viewer will figure out what's going to happen before any character in the movie can. It's as if Marshall were a magician who can't do a trick without accidentally revealing how he pulled it off. There's no surprise when you can see the trapdoor ahead.

Marshall also manages to insult several ethnic groups and possibly any viewer with a pulse or functioning brain. For example, when a couple of Texas trailer park residents (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine) show up at their daughters' Atlanta home unannounced, they're furious to discover that Jesse (Kate Hudson) is married to a physician (Aasif Mandvi) of Indian descent and that Gabi (Sarah Chalke) is married to another woman (Cameron Esposito). Because not one of the characters is likable or even convincing, one wishes they would leave each other in a huff immediately to speed up the movie's conclusion.

You can tell if an actor's tears are of the glycerin variety, and it's hard to believe that the well-toned Jennifer Aniston is a stranger to a gym. When Aniston's Sandy gets upset over her ex-husband (Timothy Olyphant) marrying a woman (Shay Mitchell) several years his junior, the homewrecker winds up seeming more sympathetic than the spurned ex.

Marshall has other potentially serviceable ideas, like having a widowed father (Jason Sudeikis) trying to keep his composure as his daughters become women, or having a stand-up comic (Jack Whitehall) desperately trying to convince the mother of his child (Britt Robertson) to marry him.

Both of these story strands might have worked if Marshall had any memory of what's funny. Watching Sudeikis bungle a karaoke version of "The Humpty Dance" or hearing Whitehall deliver a monologue that amuses the onscreen comedy club but nobody actually watching the movie doesn't count.

If you really love your parents, as I do, don't let them spend their hard-earned cash on Marshall's half-hearted effort. If you stay at home, he won't get to desecrate Father's Day.

MovieStyle on 04/29/2016

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