Following Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve comes Mother’s Day, Garry Marshall’s third film in his series of holiday-themed ensemble comedies.

While the former two were far from adored – or even admired – by critics, Mother’s Day is earning the worst reviews of the film-maker’s long career. Marshall is best known for his comedies Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride, which, like Mother’s Day, star Julia Roberts.

The website Rotten Tomatoes aggregates film reviews to work out an overall score. At 13% fresh, Mother’s Day doesn’t boast the lowest mark of the year (that honor goes to February’s Cabin Fever remake, which has the distinction of a 0% score), but given that reviews have just begun to be published after some publications broke the embargo, the percentage could go far lower.

So what do the critics (so far) say? The Hollywood Reporter’s Jon Frosch cuts deep, calling Mother’s Day “a movie not even a mother could love”, while singling out the dialogue for being “so colorless it’s like white noise”. “What’s most dispiriting about Mother’s Day is how little life there is in it, how difficult the film is to connect to despite the inherent relatability of the material,” he adds.



Part of the problem is structural. Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve came equipped with teeming big-name casts, spread out across various vignettes; hacky and dimwitted as the films were, they never stranded you with anyone for too long (not into Katherine Heigl as a lovelorn caterer? Here’s Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele stuck in an elevator!). Mother’s Day features far fewer characters and subplots, stretched thin over a punishingly protracted 118 minutes; there’s no buffer between you and the movie’s ineptitude.

Over at Indiewire, critic David Ehrlich writes that Mother’s Day is “lifeless, ugly, and vaguely evil in its gross attempt to offer something for everyone”. “It doesn’t feel like a movie so much as it does a cinematic adaptation of Walmart,” he concludes.



You know the drill: An enormous collection of dull characters, most of whom know each other through tenuous friendships or casual encounters, find love and acceptance in the shadow of a holiday that brings people together. For better or worse, Mother’s Day is a more narrowly focused film than its predecessors. Instead of splitting up two hours of screen time between 812 different story lines, this one divvies up the brunt of its duration between four major characters and sprinkles the rest of its ensemble cast on top whenever it needs some sugar.

Matt Singer of ScreenCrush laments Marshall’s fall from grace, writing that the film-maker’s “old magic touch is nowhere in evidence here”. “As a comedy, this is an unmitigated disaster,” writes Singer.

There’s an astonishing array of talent on display here, all of it wasted. Julia Roberts mostly hawks tacky jewelry. Aasif Mandvi gets racially profiled by cops while wearing a woman’s bathrobe. Jason Sudeikis demonstrates his character’s emotional growth by singing The Humpty Dance. Jennifer Aniston sulks through the entire film until a clown (yes, a clown) inspires her to turn her life around by comparing his bottomless hanky to ‘the bottomless love a mother feels for her children.’ No, really.

Mother’s Day opens in the US on 29 April, 10 days before the actual holiday. Variety’s Andrew Barker criticises this strategy, arguing that it should have opened a week later.

Atrociously written, begrudgingly acted, haphazardly assembled and never more backward than when it thinks it’s being progressive, Mother’s Day should at least be able to count on Mother’s Day traffic to boost its box office – or at least it could have, were it not opening 10 days prior.

In her review, headlined Mother’s Day: You’ll want to return this gift, Washington Post critic Jen Chaney, calls Marshall’s comedy “startlingly unappealing”. She reserves some faint praise for Roberts, saying her presence “never lets you forget she’s a movie star”, but writes that the actor ultimately “can’t save Mother’s Day from itself”.

When Aniston’s character casually mentions Groundhog Day and Flag Day in conversation, I immediately thought to myself, ‘Be quiet, you, or Garry Marshall will get even more bad ideas.’

However, Jordan Hoffman in the Guardian enjoyed the film, calling it “a goddamn trash masterpiece”.