Near the end of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (warning: 63 year old spoilers incoming) Klaatu, the alien emissary, is shot and killed, but is returned to his spaceship by his trusty robot friend Gort, and brought back to life. Klaatu is asked if Gort "has the power of life and death." He responds: "No. That power is reserved to the Almighty Spirit. This technique, in some cases, can restore life for a limited time." The line feels out of place, and it should. The original intention of the screenwriters was for Gort to bring Klaatu back to life no strings attached, but the film production codes of the day decided that the power to do that should be reserved for God. I did not know this when I first saw the film, but the line stuck out like a sore thumb anyway, and I was not surprised to learn the story behind it.
"Moms Night Out" has more than one moment like this. Overall, I really enjoyed the film, and was quite surprised to find myself doing so. My only complaint is that, mostly towards the end, it started to get overly preachy in ways that, like the line in "The Day the Earth Stood Still", stood out glaringly and pulled me out of the film. The most egregious example is when one character answers another's question with a speech (largely unrelated to said question) that boils down to "Jesus loves you." It comes out of nowhere and drags the film to a screeching halt. I have no problem with films that have strong religious content ("Philomena" was one of my top two Best Picture choices last year), but in order to work, that content has to fit into the film organically. Here it just didn't. It felt out of place, distracting, and shoehorned into the film.
That aside, I really was shocked how much I enjoyed this film. For all the attention that "Neighbors" is getting right now for its raunchy humor, for me there were actually more laughs to be found here. The film starts out with a great sense of energy propelling it forward. It's central story is simple, yet effective. A group of exhausted mothers go on a night out (Hey! Just like the title!) and leave their husbands in charge of the kids. On both sides, everything that can go wrong does, and soon all the characters are zipping back and forth across town, their journeys full of near misses with each other and humorous misunderstandings. The film manages to keep up an extremely brisk pace, one I was surprised to see that it managed to maintain. I kept expecting it to drop off or start getting stale at any moment, but, aside from the aforementioned moments of preachiness, it never did. Many of the films jokes are set up well, yet still manage to be surprising. It's rare for me to actually laugh out loud extensively when viewing a film in the theaters, but I did so more than once.
As much as I disliked the film's need to shoot itself in the foot with some glaringly out of place promotions of religion, they were worth sitting through to get to the rest of the quality entertainment it had to offer. It was a very good family film--rated PG, but still often hilarious.
No comments:
Post a Comment