Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Mother's Day Blu-ray Movie Review

It's not a beautiful day.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman July 27, 2016

Mother's Day will be remembered as the final film of Director Garry Marshall's career. The director, known for, predominantly, his light Romantic Comedies, passed away only two weeks before Mothers Day's Blu-ray release. Hopefully, the film can exist as more of a footnote rather than a defining picture in his body of work. Best known for films like Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries, and Beaches, Marshall's career was made of making people smile, his best works the movies that blended a fantasy romantic element with relatable real life challenges and humor. Marshall's final three pictures are the unrelated, but similar structured, styled, and themed, "Day" trilogy, for lack of a better word, multi-character and multi-story films with a common theme of love, family, togetherness, and working through life's most pressing challenges around a particular day of the year. None of them -- not Valentine's Day, not New Year's Eve, not Mother's Day -- were met with critical praise despite star-studded casts and well-meaning storylines. Mother's Day follows suit, a film that's perhaps a slight less ambitious in build but largely just a different day-of-the-year flavor following the same formulaic construction.

"I got red, I got green, I got yellow..."

Sandy (Jennifer Aniston) is a divorced mother of two boys struggling to make sense of her life. She's excited when her ex, Henry (Timothy Olyphant), comes calling with news. She's hopeful he wants to get back together with her. Turns out he's announcing his marriage to a much younger woman named Tina (Shay Mitchell). Sandy's friend Jesse (Kate Hudson) hasn't spoken to her parents (Margo Martingale, Robert Pine) in years. She's also hiding her marriage from them. Her sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke) is also holding back a secret from her parents. Zack (Jack Whitehall) is a budding comedian. He has a baby with his girlfriend Kristin (Britt Robertson) and wants to marry her, but she has cold feet. Miranda (Julia Roberts) is a best-selling author who is now pitching cheap jewelry on TV and looking for purpose in her life. Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) is a widower trying to raise two daughters on his own. As Mother's Day approaches, all of their lives will change and become entwined, some deeply, some tangentially, all, they hope, for the better.

Mother's Day may feature new characters (and some familiar faces from Marshall's previous works) and new storylines, but the movie is cut from the exact same cloth as Marshall's previous holiday-centric films. There are the personal and, in some cases, existential crises that only a kind word, sage advice (from a clown), and the approach of a holiday can solve. Character secrets are revealed to the audience, and to other characters, at a slow and steady pace. Sometimes, character relations with one another are biologic or brought together by serendipity. No matter how the stars align (and there are plenty of them...literal and figurative alike), none of it really amounts to much of anything. Mother's Day means well and does its best imitation of purposeful moviemaking, doing all it can to elicit an emotional response from its audience, but it's all so trite. It hasn't just been done before, it's been done before by the same filmmaker. In his last two films. Marshall's holiday trilogy could easily be pulled apart and edited together, a piece from Mother's Day here, a character string from Valentine's Day there, and a plot point from New Year's Eve and the end movie would play out pretty much the same. They're all transparent long-form vignettes that never stretch to find new meaning. At least Valentine's Day toyed with hints of novelty. While there's none of that in Mother's Day, there is underlying charm. Nevertheless, it's just another retread through-and-through.

Even the movie's top-tier cast can't save it from the doldrums of repetitiveness. The stars seem interested only in keeping the movie afloat. Their struggles of stumbling through vapid and cliché dialogue are more a fault of a script that reads like high school fan fiction and less a professionally polished piece. Gags largely fall flat and often are utilized less to draw humor and more to draw characters together (see one character's fall off the porch, another character finding himself in the spotlight with a baby in his arms, and so on). The level of manipulation in the movie staggering. Rarely organic and never truly purposeful, the film simply panders to lowest-common-denominator story writing and dialogue that only builds towards several inevitable conclusions. There's no heart or soul. Hector Elizondo cheers the movie up twice, the only real redeeming work in the film. He makes a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Pretty Woman in one scene sitting opposite of Julia Roberts when he compliments her correct choice of fork selection, and he delivers the movie's funniest line in its waning seconds.

Mother's Day Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mother's Day at least treats fans to a gorgeous 1080p transfer. The movie is vibrant and abundantly colorful, never failing to push the a rainbow full of well saturated, bright, cheerful, and accurate colors onto the screen. Gorgeously green (and always well manicured) grass, a yellow school bus, a reddish-pink "womb" parade float, backyard inflatables, clothes, assorted background products in a bar or grocery store are only a few examples of the objects that fire color onto the screen with immaculate precision. The image is clean and supremely detailed. The HD video source never looks flat or glossy, favoring an attractive, complex, but natural texturing that reveals the very finest skin textures, intimate clothing seams and stitches, grasses, bricks, woods, plastic toys...like the colors, everything in-frame is very finely detailed and effortlessly natural. Black levels are fine, flesh tones appear accurate, and source issues like noise are kept to a bare minimum. This is a wonderful presentation from Universal.

Mother's Day Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mother's Day's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack handles the movie's mostly meager needs very well. Music is the highlight, with the biggest aggressive beats from score and Pop songs playing with plenty of energy, pushing well out to the sides and engaging the subwoofer to appropriate levels. The track features plenty of music that lingers underneath, accentuating various scenes and still maintaining good clarity, but without the wider spacing and engaged LFE. There's not a lot of supportive elements; applause at the comedy club, for example, spreads nicely and naturally along the front, creating a realistic sensation -- if one is sitting in the back row. Small little crashes and thuds are appropriately clear and detailed, with a few little directional and speaker-specific bits helping shape a handful of moments. Dialogue is clear and well defined, center focused and smartly prioritized throughout.

Mother's Day Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Mother's Day contains deleted scenes and a gag reel -- not much. A UV/iTunes digital copy voucher is included with purchase.

• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 4:59 total runtime): America the Beautiful, Big Tipper, Miranda's Travel Set, Zack Changes Diaper During Standup, Rachel Driving, and Bradley Buys Pizza for the Ref.
• Gag Reel (1080p, 9:48).

Mother's Day Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mother's Day does its darnedest to tug at the heartstrings and tickle the funny bone. It succeeds on a few occasions, but the movie doesn't challenge itself or the audience, settling for baseline and deeply manufactured drama and the stale characters that play it out. Performances range from acceptable to awful, the worst offenders usually more the fault of a trite script than disinterested actors. Fans of the previous Day films might find just enough draw to the characters and material to make it worth a watch, but all but the most dedicated genre fans will find this an unforgiving two hours in front of the screen. Universal's Blu-ray features only a handful of deleted scenes and a gag reel under the bonus tab, but video and audio are strong.