There’s more naughtiness in 2017’s A Bad Mom’s Christmas, the festive comedy follow-up to 2016’s Bad Moms, that saw three stressed out and overworked mothers decide to shirk their responsibilities and lead their best lives, indulging in plenty of debauched behaviour on the way. This time Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) decide to rebel against the unholy hassle of organising Christmas while dealing with visits from their own respective mothers. This involves a lot of booze.
I recall really enjoying this franchise’s first instalment, which mined plenty of righteous laughs by showing pissed off, put-upon mothers saying ‘screw this’ and rebelling against the conventional expectations of motherhood by just doing whatever the hell they want. This film isn’t anywhere near as messed up as Bad Santa, but there’s still plenty to enjoy. I find it confusing that some critics seemed to have a problem with these films celebrating mothers’ bad behaviour – men have been getting away with this sort of stuff in movies since forever.
This one highlights the stress that mums in particular feel during the festive period to make things ‘perfect,’ facing pressure not just from their kids, but their own parents. Opening scenes of Kunis’ Amy unnecessarily stressing out are amusing (Santa hats on lobsters!), but also reminded me of how ready I was to punch my wife in the face last Christmas when she got a bit obsessive with the ‘scheduling’. Watching this, I kind of understand a little better why Katie was so highly strung – her mum was coming. Thankfully, I think we really pulled it off and had a great day, but this film asks us ‘does it really have to be this way?’
However, I’m disappointed that the film seems to forget about this rebellious spirit and morphs into a more familiar ‘coping with kooky relatives’ story. Still, it’s a pretty sweet movie about mums and daughters getting to understand each other more through various silly festive misadventures, with added male strippers, weed and booze.
The cast is uniformly excellent, though they deserve a better script with funnier gags. Christine Baranski is the fabulous MVP as Amy’s snooty, super-controlling mother who is seemingly impossible to please, constantly one-upping her daughter’s efforts in her own home and confusing her Latino boyfriend with “the help.” Susan Sarandon gets to really let loose as Carla’s gambling exploitative hellraiser mom named Isis (“like the terrorist group”). She’s the sort of mum that just rolls into town unannounced, emerging from an 18-wheeler, smoking a joint and looking for some money. Cheryl Hines is probably too young to be Kiki’s mum, but is comical as a mother so desperately needy she wears pyjamas with her daughter’s face on them, threatens to move in next door and fakes various illnesses to get attention. Bits where she watches Kiki while she sleeps and while she has sex with her husband are too silly to ring true, though.
This is true of quite a bit of the film that feels much more ‘cobbled together’ than the original. This feels more like a series of silly Saturday Night Live-style sketches – such as a tangential visit to a trampoline park – than a fully-realised plot. This is probably due to there only being around a year between parts 1 and 2, giving the impression this was a rushed production.
Thank the lord, then, that the cast is so good. Kunis’ Amy is the beating heart of the film and the closest to a believable normal mum, struggling to get by facing her first Christmas following a divorce. Hahn as Carla is much more fun, as a boozy hellion now strangely really enjoying her career at a spa waxing vaginas and scrotums for a living. Bell’s Kiki feels the most thinly sketched character, not given much to do other than be perpetually mortified by her mom’s constant mental behaviour.
Luckily, it’s a very Christmassy film, with some amusing moments involving Christmas tree theft, humiliating carolling and a shopping trip that devolves into a titanic piss-up with a ‘sexy santa’ strip show. I’m not sure this is a bona fide yuletide classic, but it is fun and it’s hard not to enjoy a movie with a cast this great.
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