Bad Moms -- a truly bad movie -- is the kind of raunchy, lazily written and directed so-called comedy that Hollywood keeps churning out, seemingly weekly, like porn. You know, movies in which shallow, one-dimensional characters you would never spend time with in real life constantly utter the F-word, trivialize sex by making it the subject of almost every joke, attend alcohol-drenched parties that devolve into total debauchery, and eventually learn difficult life lessons and make amends so audiences won't leave the theater thinking they're actually the buffoons they've appeared to be for the past hour and change.
Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who co-wrote The Hangover together), Bad Moms purports to be a paean to stressed-out, overworked, underappreciated mothers. Instead, it's an insult to them, as it continually reduces moms to silly stereotypes who aren't believable or sympathetic -- or funny -- for an instant. And the dads? Fuhgeddaboudit!
The film's setup is simple enough. Amy (Mila Kunis), an exhausted and suddenly single 32-year-old mom (she caught her slacker hubby having an online affair with a naked farm girl), is tired of being Miss Goody Two-Shoes, so she and her two gal pals, repressed stay-at-home mom Kiki (Kristen Bell) and hedonistic single mother Carla (Kathryn Hahn), decide to become "bad moms" who do whatever the hell they want. And what do they want? To hook up at bars; run amok through grocery stores like bratty adolescents; go to steamy movies in the afternoon; stop helping their kids with their homework and forgo making dinner for them every night; and, most of all, to take down bullying six-time PTA president Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate) and her fellow "Nazi moms" (Jada Pinkett Smith and Annie Mumolo), who control every aspect of their kids' school. In order to accomplish this, Amy runs against her for PTA president. But how can she persuade the other moms, who live in fear of Gwen, to vote for her instead? The answer, of course, is to invite all of them to a raging, booze-fueled party, where they can get smashed, make out with other moms, urinate on the lawn, and act like total fools. And -- spoiler alert -- it works! Which is more than can be said for the movie itself. The ensemble cast (easily the best part of this forgettable enterprise) are game enough and work hard to produce laughs, but the bottom-feeder script offers them absolutely nothing beyond dirty talk and lame pratfalls. You actually feel sorry for these actresses as they utter one insipid line after another. Oscar-winning scribe Aaron Sorkin, who is currently offering an online MasterClass in screenwriting, notes that "dialogue is pretty much where the art comes in." Lucas and Moore should sign up for his course, pronto.
Midway through the film, Amy and her husband visit a family counselor (the wonderful Wanda Sykes) who believes that the couple's marriage can be saved. But the session quickly descends into chaos and the therapist then realizes that the union is damaged beyond repair, which causes her to exclaim, "This is catastrophic sh*t!" Pretty much sums up the movie too.