Appealing leads give heart to funny but formulaic ‘Bad Moms’ (Movie review)

Whereas “Bad Teacher” and “Bad Santa” played up the jokes in their titles – wouldn’t it be funny if a teacher or a Santa was monumentally bad at their job? – “Bad Moms” goes a bit deeper. Yes, there is that sequence – featured in the trailer – where Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) go on a drunken spree through the supermarket, but ultimately, the film delivers the message that it’s OK to be less than perfect; you can be a “bad mom” and still be a great mom.

Rather than one cog in a three-woman ensemble, Amy emerges as the main character. We meet her in a more adult version of the madcap randomness we’ve come to expect from the team behind the “Hangover” trilogy. Suffice it to say she’s covered with coffee and spaghetti and her minivan is missing a side-view mirror – and that’s before she stumbles into the bar to commiserate with her new “bad mom” friends.

Kiki lets her husband and four kids walk all over her; it’s somewhat bizarre to see Veronica Mars lacking self-confidence, but just go with it. Carla is the closest thing to a bad mom in the style of “Bad Teacher” and “Bad Santa,” and the naturally funny Hahn gives some snort-worthy deliveries of otherwise straightforward comedy lines like “I’m gonna get f****d up!”

The dads are straw men covering the whole spectrum, from “About a Boy’s” David Walton as a worthless layabout to “crazy/beautiful’s” Jay Hernandez as the perfect dream guy. Similarly, Christina Applegate’s Gwendolyn leads a PTA triumvirate that’s the grown-up version of the “Mean Girls.” There’s a nice twist that gives more depth to her character, though. The only kids we get to know are Amy’s, and they’re pretty unremarkable: A college-driven girl and a boy who won’t do his homework.

“Bad Moms” is structurally unimaginative and also lacking in creative set pieces (we get “the party scene” and “the speech”), but the appeal of the three leads carries it a long way – even when the scenes themselves are absurd. For example, in a reverse of the “Crazy, Stupid, Love” plot, Amy goes out to a bar to pick up guys. First, she misses a chance because she forgot to take off her wedding ring. Fair enough. But then guys dismiss her because she’s awkward and says the wrong thing. Really? Guys are turning down adorable big-eyed Mila Kunis for that reason? Not likely.

But maybe it’s a matter of perspective. Maybe a lot of real-world women would not be so hard on Steve Carell’s character from “Crazy, Stupid, Love” either.

A lot of the fun to be had with “Bad Moms” – and we also saw this in “Neighbors 2” and “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” – comes from seeing women in scenarios that traditionally feature men. In addition to the bar scene, there’s also an out-of-control house party (although it does wrap up by 11, in mom fashion).

Of those three movies, “Mike and Dave” is easily the funniest, but “Bad Moms” is the only one that tries to say something, and it also offers up more laughs and heart than “Neighbors 2” – so I put it in second place. The credits include short interviews with the six lead actresses and their moms, and those interviews deliver the message in a shorter yet less blunt fashion than the film’s narrative: A lot of moms dwell on their perceived shortcomings, but at the end of the day, their kids turned out pretty good, and some of them became good moms themselves.