MOM & DAD (2017) Dir. Brian Taylor

Genre movie review time, looking at the surprisingly less mental than promised Nic Cage kill fest from the director of Crank and Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance.



MOM & DAD (2017)
Stars: Nic Cage, Selma Blair
Dir: Brian Taylor
Run: 1hr 23mins
MPAA: R

Mom & Dad is the new film from one half of the directing duo behind the Crank films and that piss poor Ghost Rider film, you know, the one where Nic Cage pisses fire. Well Brian Taylor brings us his first solo directing gig with Mom & Dad, a film that promised to unleash Nic Cage's unhinged crazy side and give us a bug nuts bat shit crazy darkly comic horror film. Well, that didn't quite happen.

Coming off the successful SyFy show, Happy!, Taylor brings his A.D.D style visuals to the suburbs of middle America for a film that follows some sort of virus that turns parents against their kids. It's never explicitly mentioned that there is a virus i'm just assuming this for this review, either a virus or a signal, much like that waste of time Stephen King adaptation Cell and the more darkly comic indie flick from a few year back, interestingly titled The Signal. So for the sake of this review, we will refer to the incident as a virus.

The film follows the Ryan family, Dad Nic Cage, Mom Selma Blair and their two sprogs. They're definitely a dysfunctional family which is revealed more through-out the film. Dad is a businessman and mom is a former Architect (i think), their daughter is at that age where she's rebelling against parental authority from her choice of boyfriend, ditching school with her friends etc and their youngest son seems to be lonely child. When a news report shows footage of mother leaving her child on the train tracks shocks everyone, more and more incidents are reported of parents attacking and killing their children. Then shit hits the fan when all the parents show up at the school and a massacre begins.
Daughter escapes with to her friends house to see what the hell is going on and ends up having to escape after her friend is killed by her mom. Anyways, she returns home to find her brother in the care of their housekeeper who has apparently killed her own daughter. Then Nic Cage returns home followed by mom and the next 45 minutes are basically mom and dad attempting to kill their kids.

Plot wise its a bit hollow. There's no explanation as to the cause of the attacks, the characters aren't fully realised in the 83 minute run-time and there's no resolution. It's an intriguing idea that is never full explained and this probably the films biggest problem. We don't really care if the kids die because we don't get to know them. We know that their parents resent them for basically ruining their lives. Dad was a cool cat back in the day, drove a muscle car and got all the chicks then he knocked up Selma and became a 9-5 drone. This is all explained in a pretty great scene between Cage and Blair when he purchases and builds a pool table in the basement. We know that the parents resent the kids, but a little more back story wouldn't have gone a miss. While he's not as unhinged and full on Vampires Kiss Cage, he does manage to let loose for a brief time towards the end and it does seem like Cage is having fun, but for the most part this is a more restrained Cage, not as much as his brilliant performance ins David Gordon Green's under appreciated Joe, but when a film promises all the Cage madness you can handle and you only get a 8th of what he brought to films like Face/Off or Bad Lieutenant New Orleans, your expectations are massively let down. Still, it's always fun to see Cage act in a film that doesn't look like it was made for £4.99 and like i previously mentioned, it looks like Cage is finally having a bit of fun after years of mediocre genre crap to pay of his tax.

Selma Blair probably gives her best performance in Mom & Dad, even though she does become a murderous psycho mom from hell, there's an essence of tragedy in her story or back story. She gave up a career for her kids, her husband works long ours, her daughter is stealing from her and her son seems to have issues. So you definitely feel a bit sorry for her and thats the sign of a decent performance. The kids are ok, they're kids, they're doing kid acting, nothing spectacular.

Lance Henriksen has all of about 30 seconds of screen time. What a waste.

Violence wise, it's pretty tame, there's some nice kills but the majority of the red stuff is quick cut, this makes no sense because the film is clearly aimed at a more mature audience and it kinda renders the whole idea pointless. For a film that promises parents brutally murdering their kids then genre fans will be let down. Taylors direction also seems a bit flat and generic considering the style he brought to Crank and Happy!.

So Mom & Dad didn't meet expectations, it's not a terrible film, it's not a great film. It's simply just an ok film. Nothing ground breaking, nothing genre defining and not the kind of film you stand around a water cooler talking about how crazy and fucked it was, it's simply an ok film. Nothing more nothing less. By all mean's give Mom & Dad a shot, but for films that feature people going mad and killing people, i'd recommend checking out Cooties, The Signal and Mayhem. Mom & Dad get's 3 out 5 as i can't give it 2.5 and it's slightly better than a 2 star film.