‘Bad Moms’ dubbed 2016’s worst comedy

Colleen Kelly

My expectations were low and I was still disappointed.

“Bad Moms” is this summer’s last blockbuster comedy, so that pressure coupled with its solid cast list should have produced one of the hits of the year – even if the trailers weren’t the best. The film follows Amy (Mila Kunis), an overworked mother of two trying and failing to be perfect. When Amy realizes that her husband is cheating on her, she and fellow struggling moms Carla (Kathryn Hahn) and Kiki (Kristin Bell) decide to cut loose and find themselves.

To say that this film was a train wreck would be an insult to the 2015 hit “Trainwreck.” The basic concept of this story was only marginally appealing from the get go and the final product was honestly one of the worst films I have seen. The writing was one of the worst issues, but certainly not the only.

First off, none of the characters felt believable in the slightest. Every female character was a one dimensional stereotype and the men were all helpless children. Not one person in the entire film had a brain cell between them, not a single character’s decision made an ounce of sense. The dialogue alone was the most cringe-worthy assortment of mediocrity I’ve borne witness to in recent memory. This film –alongside “Ghostbusters”– was marketed as an empowering film for and about women, but I don’t see how anyone could watch this and not be offended by how the women are portrayed. Do the writers and director of “Bad Moms” even like women?

What’s worse was that each scene barely lasted two minutes and were haphhazardly butchered in the editing process, resulting in a Frankenstein’s monster of a mess between the ridiculously short scenes and break-neck pacing.

The final nail in the coffin for me was the acting. Kunis, Bell, Hahn, Christina Applegate and Jada Pinkett Smith are funny women, but it’s safe to say that these were each of their worst performances to date. There was no saving grace among them aside from a few well-delivered lines on Bell’s part. Her weird one-liners were the only time I ever cracked a smile, but I never once laughed. It’s one thing to do decently with garbage, it’s another to not even try and salvage a project. I have to assume that each of these actresses signed on without ever having read the script, because each of them is better than this. The absolute worst actress, though, was Oona Laurence, the child actor playing Kunis’s daughter. Her presence and delivery were annoying enough to make me genuinely angry. I don’t have any notes for the male actors, none of them made any impression on me, which is terrible in itself.

Please, do not waste your time on “Bad Moms.” From the horrific acting to the utterly stupid writing to the massacre that must have occurred on the editing room floor, this film was positively garbage. This wouldn’t even be fun to see for a bad movie night, it’s just painful.

Rating: 1/5 stars