mother’s day review [Netflix] – Review in FilmTotaal

Director: Mateusz Rakowicz | Script: Lukasz M. Maciejewski, Mateusz Rakowicz | Cast: Agnieszka Grochowska (Nina), Adrian Delikta (Max), Dariusz Chojnacki (Igor), Sebastian Elda (Teleskop) ea | Time to play: 94 minutes | Year: 2023

In the wake of Mother the next killer mom comes to Netflix, in the action movie Mother’s Day. She’s a trained fighting machine with a shady past and an estranged child, so the comparison is easy to make. Does that also mean that this Polish variant is the great success of Mother will it match?

“Leave the ladies alone,” main character Nina says to a group of street crooks who harass women on the street at night. The fact that these gentlemen pounced on the retired NATO agent on Mother’s Day, also known in Polish as ‘Dzień Matki’, is a mistake she will remember for a long time. In the pouring rain and blaring techno music, she deftly pummels the prowling young man, but she doesn’t escape unscathed either. It is the beginning of a long series of struggles, in which the alcoholic mother can go a wonderfully long time with no recovery time.

During the day, grumpy Nina squeezes wrecked cars as easily as beer cans at a local junkyard with a tow truck. After her work, she parks in an expensive neighborhood to feed her unhealthy obsession with her estranged teenage son, spying on him through binoculars. Her flawed past in her intelligence service has forced her to fake her own death and lose her only child to a very happy family. Everything changes when a group of gangsters in brightly colored tracksuits snatch teenager Max from his skateboard and throw him into a blind van.

The mother gets to dust off her proverbial uniform again and sweep through the Polish underworld in the rest of the film to bring her son to the surface. These action sequences are the best aspect of it. Mother’s Day. Creative choreography and thoughtful cinematography come together to show how the belligerent mother shows the thieves every corner of the room. Drug trafficking, she traffics in people, kidnapping; there are many situations in which women are often abused or mistreated. Nina single-handedly reverses these expectations and shows who wears the pants.

Mother’s Day has suspiciously many features of well-known Hollywood movies, such as the threatening voicemail Taken or the dark neon style of john wick. Putting your own touch on it is a bit tricky. Nina gets stuck from one place to another with more and more open wounds, but she never manages to bring the movie to a satisfying conclusion. The tune remains the same: the dear son makes mistakes over and over again, and mom can come to help him. There is little chemistry between the two actors. Mother’s Day more of a never-ending action movie than a justifiable revenge movie.

Mother’s Day can be seen in Netflix.