At The Movies: JLo deserves more than The Mother, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On a profound oddity

The Mother (M18)

117 minutes, showing on Netflix
2 stars

The story: Do not mess with this mama.

Jennifer Lopez plays a deadly sniper

drawn out of hiding when dangerous enemies from her past abduct her daughter (Lucy Paez).

The Mother, produced by Lopez in partnership with Netflix, clocked 83.71 million hours of views over its May 12 debut weekend for the streamer’s biggest movie opening of 2023.

The revenge thriller is Taken (2008) with Lopez in the Liam Neeson role of the protective parent. She is known simply as “the Mother” because why bother thinking up names for the stock characters of a hand-me-down story?

A United States military operative, the Mother places her newborn under foster care for the baby girl’s safety after she turns informant against her two arms-dealer lovers (Gael Garcia Bernal and Joseph Fiennes).

She herself retreats to a remote cabin in Alaska.

Twelve years later – how did she pass the time? – the pair of nasties locate and kidnap the daughter to bait her.

And the Mother duly responds by emerging from seclusion for an action-packed rescue mission that travels from Cincinnati to a foot chase through the colourful streets of Havana.

She knife-fights, fist-fights, waterboards one assailant and batters another with a motorbike helmet.

Lopez’s athleticism goes a long way towards invigorating New Zealand director Niki Caro’s (Mulan, 2020) standard stunts, which are nevertheless more entertaining than the self-serious maternal drama – the Mother’s idea of bonding is to take her petulant pre-teen kid combat training.

A 53-year-old action heroine is a bracing sight. But Lopez is an actress capable of much more, and her particular set of skills is left untapped here.

Hot take: JLo is a genuine star, shooting enemies while modelling the Fall 2023 line of fur hoods. The rest of the over-familiar actioner is forgettable.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (PG13)

89 minutes, available on Apple TV+
4 stars

The story: Marcel is an adorable, single-eyed, one-inch-tall (2.5cm) seashell who wears shoes and lives with his grandmother Nana Connie in a Los Angeles house, sleeping on a slice of bread. A film-maker begins posting his everyday adventures and turns the mollusc into an Internet sensation with tens of millions of fans.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On is as quirky as it sounds, yet wholly believable, thanks to the naturalistic integration of stop-motion and live-action footage that reaped best animation nominations at the 2023 Academy Awards, British Film Academy Awards and Golden Globes.

The comedic mockumentary is an expansion of the same-titled YouTube series created by Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate in 2010.

Camp writes, directs and appears in a thin fictionalisation of himself as the film-maker here.

Actress-comedienne Slate voices Marcel in a baby-like pitch, and whenever Marcel threatens to become cloyingly cutesy, he charms with his innocent humour and surprises with his insights: an “audience” is not a “community”, he observes of his social media fans overrunning his front lawn to snap selfies.

And a community is what he badly misses, ever since his extended family was accidentally carted away in a sock drawer when the former occupant moved out.

He uses his new-found fame to look for his clan in a quest of growing urgency as he starts to lose his ageing Nana (wonderfully voiced by Isabella Rossellini) to dementia and a debilitating fall off a dryer.

Camp and Slate debuted their original shorts while a married couple. Their divorce by the time they made the movie – a shared labour of love – adds to Marcel’s heartfelt ruminations on grief, separation and loneliness.

Hot take: A handcrafted oddity miniature but profound, like its title hero.