Bad Moms: Motherhood Through Bro-Colored Glasses

In Bad Moms, Amy (Mila Kunis) is a working mother of two who, out of exhaustion, rejects the perfect-mom paradigm. She joins forces with single-mom Carla (Kathryn Hahn) and stay-at-home naïf Kiki (Kristen Bell, whose hair is perpetually limp and sad, just like her) to reclaim “bad” parenting. But since Bad Moms is a film about women made by the men who wrote The Hangover, it’s motherhood through bro-colored glasses: Drinking sequences, the word “vagina,” and blunt-force impact are mined for laughs, and just as modern moms are hamstrung by a lack of paid maternity leave and gender double standards, the film’s potential for revenge-flick fun or bawdy escapism is curbed through shallow sentimentality.