‘The Mother’ movie review: Jennifer Lopez rocks this taut actioner

Niki Caro’s tale of an assassin coming out of retirement to keep her daughter out of the crosshairs of some nasty people is the best kind of lean, mean fighting machine

If one cannot have Jodie Foster for a mum, then JLo would do very well. With Liam Neeson and his very special set of skills, one would be set forever. Niki Caro, after the gorgeous Mulan and the critically acclaimed Whale Rider, turns her sights on the action movie and delivers solid thrills. This is a movie well deserving of Jennifer Lopez; unlike that hideous, horrible Shotgun Wedding.  

Quite like Planeearlier this year, The Mother does not waste any time getting into the action. An unnamed woman (Lopez) is being interrogated by the FBI. She tells them two very bad men — Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Álvarez (Gael García Bernal) are after her and even though the agents assure her of her safety, she knows better.

Her scepticism is proved right when the safe house is breached. We realise she is heavily pregnant, just before Lovell sticks a knife into her belly. She improvises a bomb (surely she learnt to fashion explosives from a bottle of cleaning product in the same class that Jason Bourne went to) and is hustled to safety.

She delivers a healthy baby girl but is convinced to sign over parenting rights for the good of the child. She does so, after extracting a promise from Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) to look out for her daughter, keep her informed of her daughter’s life with an annual photo, and let her know immediately if the girl is in any danger. “I want her to have the most stable, normal life there is,” she insists.

All goes well for 12 years for Zoe (Lucy Paez), while the Mother is living rough in the freezing cold of Alaska. Then everything goes wrong. Zoe is kidnapped by Álvarez’ thugs. Off Mother and Cruise go to Havana to confront Álvarez who is living in a bizarre church-like mansion with many candles and brittle tapers just waiting to catch a spark.

There is a bit of a flashback as Mother tells Cruise how she got involved with these two despicable men. In the course of her training as a sniper, Mother crossed paths with Lovell, an ex-SAS man who supplies “powerful people needing things that aren’t on the menu.” Álvarez is the one stealing the arms and Lovell finds the buyers. Mother brings the two together and then sells them both out when she realises they are not only running guns.

There is action and thrills aplenty and so are the quiet moments. Lopez is in top form whether sashaying in a figure-hugging sheath, swirling through some nifty parkour, taking an impossible shot or telling Zoe truths about the food chain — “There is nothing you ever ate that didn’t come from violence.”