Kiwi director Niki Caro has carved out a little career as a workmanlike – workwomanlike? – director of Hollywood films. It isn’t where most of us hoped she’d end up after Whale Rider, but I suppose having a career making films at all is something worth celebrating. Most people don’t get to do that. And hey, the last movie on her CV was Disney’s live-action Mulan, which was a perfectly competent if unmemorable live-action Disney remake.

The same can probably be said for her new film, The Mother, which arrived on Netflix just in time for Mother’s Day. Given how few warm fuzzies it contains, the powers that be might have resisted a release strategy that capitalises on a holiday celebrating maternal love and warmth. While it’s possible The Mother does provide some thematic content about “the true meaning of motherhood,” it’s a lot more about Jennifer Lopez, now 53 years old, showing off her sniper skills and accumulating a body count that rivals the number of candles on her last birthday cake.

J-Lo doesn’t look 53 – given the age of most male movie action stars, that’s not even very old – so suspension of disbelief that she’d be doing this is not the problem here. Really, the suspension of disbelief we can’t make is that any character would be doing the things this character does. The more films that hit the streamers that are in some way a descendant of Taken, itself a descendant of Charles Bronson’s entire 1970s oeuvre, the fewer we can remember an hour after we’ve finished watching them. Perhaps, then, tying them in to a holiday isn’t such a bad idea.

J-Lo plays the title character, who never gets a name, in another example of that old cinematic chestnut that has also worn out its welcome. She was a skilled sharpshooter who served in Iraq or Afghanistan or one of the United States’ other foreign wars, and started getting mixed up in arms deals when she was back on U.S. soil. She found herself in a tricky spot between two lovers who were connected to either side of an arms deal gone bad, that being fellow former marine Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and arms dealer Hector Alvarez (Gael Garcia Bernal). The details of what went wrong with the deal don’t really matter, and I’m not sure if the movie even provides them.

What’s worth knowing is that The Mother has been brought to a safe house by FBI agent William Cruise (Omari Hardwick), no relation to Tom. She immediately susses out that it is not, in fact, very safe, and before long, the place is on the receiving end of a fusillade of bullets. Only then is it revealed what the camera hasn’t shown us so far: she’s pregnant.

It won’t surprise you to know that J-Lo survives this onslaught, given that she’s the star of the movie. It may surprise you to know that her baby survives it, given that Fiennes’ character sticks a knife in her belly to end her pregnancy – even though he may be the father. But when this baby is born healthy, the feds convince The Mother that she won’t stay that way if The Mother is allowed to raise her. Bad men will always be seeking them out and using the girl as leverage, if not just outright executing her. The Mother’s only option is to get lost and to leave her child in the care of adoptive parents. Alaska would seem sufficiently far away from Washington D.C., but of course it isn’t – even a dozen years later.

Setting this up as another northern-set thriller – we’ve gotten a lot of those in recent years as well – may have been a good way to go with this material, and would have also showcased what Caro learned of this sort of environment from directing Charlize Theron in North Country. Instead, that great winter jacket with the furry hood that features in The Mother’s promotional materials is pretty much just a red herring. J-Lo’s character may start out in Alaska, but not much time later she’ll be in Cuba, then Illinois, before a return to Alaska that feels about as perfunctory as anything else in the film.

When it’s not showcasing The Mother’s deadliness with a long-range weapon, not to mention her close combat skills, The Mother does have the occasional distinctive moment. The depiction of J-Lo’s 12-year-old daughter, Zoe, by Lucy Paez, is one of those. The movie is smart about how intelligent modern teenagers are. The obvious way to go would be to make this a big revelation to Zoe that this lethal commando is her birth mother, but she picks up on it pretty quickly, and calls out anyone who has the audacity to feed her another line of bullshit. While at first it seems disappointing that this realisation isn’t played for greater dramatic intrigue, it actually pays off by giving us a more believable teenager, one who is shrewd, one who is wise to the ways adults try to protect her from the world.

The movie’s blood lust, though, is a bit tin-eared during the perennial cycle of ever more gun violence in the U.S. There’s a scene where J-Lo sets herself up with her sniper scope trained on a park where some bad dudes are planning to move in and kidnap Zoe. When she starts picking them off, there would be no way for the screaming parents and children in the park to know that she’s actually killing men who sneer and snarl and have too many tattoos. To them, it’s just another massacre where innocent bodies are dropping to the pavement. The Mother is a “just another” of its own kind, and not much better.

 

The Mother is currently streaming on Netflix.