Apparently there are drawbacks to winning an Oscar. Who knew? I mean, the positives are obvious: you are employable, forever, in a disgustingly lucrative, ego-driven profession… Adulation will follow wherever you go and commoners will treat you as a larger-than-life nearly God-like figure no matter how disgusting your personal life becomes. On the other hand, after you win an Oscar, you probably never again consider another profession, which is a shame because Nicolas Cage sure could use one about now. I’m sure that with practice, study, and discipline he could make a fair living as an insurance salesman, Tiger King, or “cautionary tale” spokesman. All of these would be superior to what Nicolas is doing right now, which is taking slab after slab of meaty roles in nothing films.
This will go on indefinitely.
Today’s nothing film is especially poor. I’d love to pretend Mom and Dad was three or four rewrites away from passable entertainment, but that is just not so. The premise made such impossible. It said, “You think The Happening was bad? Hold my beer.” In today’s film –for no scientific reason given- parents have decided to kill their children. With a premise that alarming, this black comedy had better be funny, right? I’m still awaiting laugh #1.
It starts with a mother abandoning her car on train tracks while the carseat in the back is still occupied. If that seems like fun, you’ll just laugh yourself silly when the Ryan’s housekeeper takes a butcher knife to her own daughter. The Ryan parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) are away when this happens, but everyone in the film is triggered and attuned to prolicide when they get the special static message on the radio.
I never in my life imagined that I could utter the phrase, “it’s kinda like The Happening, only worse.”
Eventually this film devolves into the Ryan children (Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur) hanging in the family basement while trying to figure out how to stay alive. However, this only occurs after a child birthing scene in which the new mother hears the magical static and subsequently
attempts to strangle her newborn. At that point in the film, I cared nothing for whether or not I was watching quality; if you put a mother-strangling-infant on screen, you better have a superior explanation to, “the TV made me do it.”
Mom and Dad could have been Hamlet after the hospital scene and I’d still have panned this film. As is, it was not Hamlet; it wasn’t even memorable Nicolas Cage. As the cunning matriarch luring her children into a trap, Selma Blair comes off as a much better defined character than our standard Rage in the Cage performance. None of that matters. This is a bad film and I recommend it to no one.
Capturing horror in screenplay fishing nets
Long odds you’ll find if taking success bets
Many plots I deride
But hyperbole aside
Killing one’s kids is as tasteless as it gets
Rated R, 86 Minutes
Director: Brian Taylor
Writer: Brian Taylor
Genre: Bad ideas
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Sociopaths
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Nurturers
