MOTHER'S BOYS
"After abandoning her family, Jude Madigan returns home and starts on an obsessed path towards reclaiming her former life."
In Mother's Boys, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a crazy person who walked out on her husband Peter Gallagher because she just couldn't handle his eyebrows, anymore. Unfortunately, she also walked out on her three young children, and they were all really broken up about the whole thing. Then Peter Gallagher fell in love with the not-so-crazy Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, the kids forgot all about their mother, and also they bought a dog, because kids love dogs. But oh no! One day, Jamie Lee Curtis decides she wants her family back, and so she drives back into town wearing a series of fierce outfits with sewn-in shoulder pads, and she's still crazy, which does not bode well for poor Joanne Whalley-Kilmer.
So she hangs around her kids, trying to get them to love her again by buying them all Game Boys, then she takes a bath in front of her mentally unstable eldest son, telling him how much he loved being in her womb that the doctors had to cut him out of her body in order to get him to leave. Then she tries to fuck her estranged husband, suddenly okay with the sheer bulk of his eyebrows despite their having grown much larger in the intervening years, but he turns her down because he's far too enamored with Val Kilmer's main squeeze to play Hungry, Hungry Hippos with his psychotic ex-lover ever again.
Jamie Lee visits Joanne at work and cuts herself with a shard of broken glass while her romantic rival can only stare in abject terror, all in an attempt to get Joanne fired from her assistant principal job at the elementary school by blaming the assault on her. This... doesn't work, maybe? I think maybe the big cheese put her on double-secret probation. After teaching her mentally unstable eldest son to drive despite his being underage, she convinces him that Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is the cause of all her family's troubles, and that she needs to be removed from the picture in order for everybody to be happy once again. Being mentally unstable, the young lad (named Kes, which is just the worst name ever for anything other than a bird of prey) agrees with his crazy-eyed mother, and they hatch a plan to deal with the usurper.
But a problem arises when Jamie Lee's mother, who isn't exactly close with her daughter, overhears Kes as he goes over the plan with his stupid brothers, and she starts accusing the boy of being the seed of evil. He doesn't exactly help his case by pushing her down the stairs in a panic, sending the old bag of bones to the hospital, where Jamie Lee shows up wearing a skin-tight turtleneck to visit. In her heavily medicated state, Mother's mother lets slip that Mother's father used to touch his own daughter inappropriately back in the day before he committed suicide right in front of her. Jamie Lee tries to kill her in a fit of rage, but a kindly nurse shows up to spoil her plans, and she runs off into the night, putting her elaborate scheme to destroy Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and take back her rightful place in the Madigan family in motion.
That elaborate plan involves Jamie Lee's children handcuffing Joanne and holding a mock trial, and while they're all preoccupied, she will cut the break line on Joanne's Volvo, and then... presumably after the kids let Joanne go, she'll have to leave (?), at which point Jamie, having earlier kidnapped the family dog, will wait until Joanne's Volvo reaches a particularly treacherous turn on the only road leading from the Madigan house to anything resembling civilization, where she will release the dog into the road, causing Joanne to swerve in a panic to avoid the beloved animal, and provided she swerves in the right direction at the exact right time, her Volvo will careen off a cliff, down into a deadly gorge, where she will die in a spectacular explosion.
But wouldn't you know it, the plan goes awry. To begin with, one of Kes' brothers drops a glass of water and falls on it, impaling himself on it. As he slowly bleeds to death, Kes' other, fatter brother convinces him to go outside and search for the missing dog, and as soon as the crazy kid's out of the picture he sets Joanne Whalley-Kilmer free so that she can drive the nearly-dead boy to the hospital. Once outside, the fat one changes his mind about the whole "helping save his brother's life" thing because Kes will be awful sore when he finds out. So instead of overpowering the fat asshole and snatching the car keys from his chubby fingers, Joanne just takes off running down the road with the other boy clutched in her hands like a blood-soaked parcel.
Upon learning this, Kes hops behind the wheel of Joanne's Volvo and sets off in hot pursuit, with the fat one in the passenger seat, slowly swelling with every passing moment. They catch up to Joanne, but Kes finds he's unable to actually stop the car, due to his mother (unbeknownst to him) having cut the breaks earlier, and when Jamie Lee sees the Volvo speeding down the road toward her, she sets the dog free, and the car swerves, sending two thirds of her progeny zooming over the cliff. So at least that part of the plan worked.
Joanne rushes to help the boys, who ever-so-conveniently landed in one of those notorious cliff-trees, teetering precariously on the brink of total disaster. She manages to save the fat one, sending him waddling up toward to the road, but as she tries to save Kes, the tree shifts, sending her Joanne tumbling over the car. Kes grabs her hand, but he's a limp-wristed little boy and doesn't have the strength to pull her up, so Jamie Lee arrives on the scene to save the day. She convinces her stupid son to let mommy help Joanne, because mommy's strong and mommy's a good person who would never do anything to put the woman who replaced her in Peter Gallagher's eyebrow-hair laden bed in danger.
Of course, being psychotic, Jamie Lee grins evilly and lets go of Joanne's hand the very moment she grasps it, and the poor woman almost falls to her death, clutching the door and momentarily stopping her descent. Because John Lennon was a prophet, Instant Karma strikes and Jamie Lee Curtis loses her own grip on the Volvo, silently plunging to her death, and as the screen faded to black and the end credits began to roll, I couldn't stop laughing. I literally laughed out loud until the credits stopped, and Netflix returned to its main menu screen. Then I kept laughing.
Mother's Boys is absolute trash. From beginning to end, the movie is nothing but ridiculous, melodramatic garbage, and it gave me so much joy. The main cast is fully committed to this farce, trying really hard and playing every inane moment of it all completely straight-faced. They all act like they're starring in some critically acclaimed Silence Of The Lambs shit, but this is sub-The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, bottom of the barrel nonsense. And French-Canadian director Yves Simoneau directs the whole thing like he's trying to win all the Academy Awards.
He pulls out all the stops for this crap, using every single "artistic" technique he ever saw other, better directors use first. As a result, the movie features moments of visual brilliance, but more often than not the director's intended vision just feels pretentious, like the result of a snooty film student who think he's better than all of the other losers in his class, trying way too hard to impress the jaded teacher with his brilliant and innovative work. The tonal dissonance between the director's visual efforts and the dopey screenplay create a perfect storm of "what the fuck am I watching" material.
Combine this with Jamie Lee Curtis chewing the scenery like a starving woman at an all-you-can-eat buffet in one of the few roles that has ever allowed her to just cut loose on camera, and Mother's Boys is really something special. It's as dumb as a sack of broken hammers, but it made me laugh. If only they could all be this entertaining.
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