If giving a cast of women a comedy sequel every bit as stupid, lazy and misery-inducing as the latter “Hangover” movies counts as social progress, well then I guess I’ve got some good news.
Like nearly every comedy sequel ever made, “A Bad Moms Christmas,” the slapdash follow-up to 2016’s hard-R hit, is a bad movie. It’s long, mushy, aimless — a bunch of talented performers eking a few laughs out of a seemingly nonexistent script. It rarely musters even the modest charms of its predecessor, opting instead for a rancid fruitcake recipe of gross-out gags, naughty behavior and saccharine family psychodrama. As with the first movie, No. 2 reinforces the conservative social values and gender roles it’s supposedly satirizing. Unlike the first movie, it’s not even funny about it.
Like nearly every comedy sequel ever made, “A Bad Moms Christmas” is the same movie as the first one but with a few things added to it. The extra things in this case are the Christmas theme and the introduction of the Bad Moms’ own Bad Moms.
Amy (Mila Kunis) welcomes her domineering mother (Christine Baranski); Kiki (Kristen Bell) welcomes her overly dependent mother (Cheryl Hines); and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) welcomes her wild and absent mother (Susan Sarandon).
There’s drama. There’s high jinks. There’s the waxing of a Santa stripper’s scrotum.
In the first “Bad Moms,” the three mothers shook off the societal expectations of being “perfect” in favor of some booze-fueled shenanigans. They basically do the same thing here, blowing off Christmas shopping to get wasted, give a lap dance to a mall Santa and steal a Christmas tree from a Lady Foot Locker.
This time, they’re also bucking against the expectations of their mothers, each of whom is objectively awful in her own way. The greatest conflict is between Amy and her mother. Amy just wants to have a low-key holiday, but her well-heeled mother insists on lavish decorations and parties. “Mothers don’t enjoy; they give joy,” Baranski tells Kunis.
The younger women eventually confront their own flawed moms, and things are sad for a while, but then they’re happy again and then the movie’s over, all the pieces in place for a “Bad Grandmas” spinoff.
As we go through the interminable motions, “A Bad Moms Christmas” pads its running time with bad behavior and slow-mo montages (the movie is probably 30 percent montages). Very little of it is funny. For the little that is, credit goes entirely to the actresses.
Bell and Hahn are two of the funniest people in comedy, and, as with the first “Bad Moms,” they repeatedly transcend the material. And Baranski and Hines are welcome additions to the “Bad Moms” crew. Baranski’s tyrannical matriarch is an amusing character in theory and well-played by the actress. But the script fails her and everyone else.
The script, written by co-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, finds one or two jokes for each character and hammers on them endlessly. You get the feeling that “A Bad Moms Christmas” was a fun film to make, that a video of these hilarious women hanging out for 90 minutes would have made for a better time for the viewer.
Then maybe the movie wouldn’t have been terrible. Then maybe the movie wouldn’t have been like nearly every comedy sequel ever made.
Movie review: A Bad Moms Christmas
Grade: D+
Cast: Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christine Baranski, Susan Sarandon, Cheryl Hines, Jay Hernandez, Peter Gallagher
Directors: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Rating: R for crude sexual content and language throughout and some drug use
Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Theaters: Aksarben, Alamo, Bluffs 17, Majestic, Oakview, Regal, Twin Creek, Village Pointe, Westroads
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