“bad Moms” Mixes Sentiment With Raunch And Ends Up Vulgar

Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here. [...] in a speech addressing the PTA, Mila Kunis, as a mother of two, stands at the podium and drops f-bombs on the gathering, as — believe it or not — treacly music on the sound track lets us know that she is expressing lovely sentiments. Perhaps this single line of dialogue sums up “Bad Moms” best, as spoken by Kathyrn Hahn as a mom about having kids: “I know we make fun of them, but f---, I love them so much.” Writer-directors Scott Moore and Jon Lucas, who wrote “The Hangover,” find out that, once you involve children, you can’t really do a female version of “The Hangover,” at least not without being a lot more daring than they were prepared to be. In a glancing way, “Bad Moms” touches on a truth of modern parenting, that kids today seem to have every hour filled, with soccer practice and music and language lessons. Gone are the days when kids would come home and watch “F Troop” reruns on television, and the movie suggests that those may have been better times. Oona Lawrence gives a good child performance as Amy’s 12-year-old daughter, a completely wired nervous wreck already worrying about getting into an Ivy League college. “Bad Moms” has the schizophrenic aura of something written by committee, with wild changes of tone every five minutes and with frequent and truly awful musical interludes piecing the disparate scenes together. Kunis, Hahn and Kristen Bell form the movie’s trio, and pry two or three laughs out of the script, but that amounts only to one each.