Review of Mom and Dad (2018) by Wayne K — 19 Oct 2018

Mom & Dad has an undoubtedly interesting premise, taking the concept of midlife crisis and seeming to live only for your children and putting a violent twist on it. Nicolas Cage is as watchable as ever, and all I wanted was for things to go wild, so Cage could do what he does best.

He says that it's his favourite movie of his own in the last 10 years. That decade has been an undoubtedly mixed bag, but that's a pretty odd statement. What begins as a fun variant on the dissatisfied parent plotline devolves into a confusingly filmed, progressively frustrating slasher flick.

When the central parents lose their mind and go after their children, it's completely baffling that, since it's life threatening and all over the news, the kids don't run as far away as possible.

Everyone just stands around, waiting to see who will make the next move, rather than trying to escape. It flies in the face of basic survival instincts, and as such it's hard to root for the children to make it out alive, since they take very few steps towards that goal.

Also it ends so abruptly that you'd swear they ran out of budget and couldn't afford to film a climax. For me it was elevated, if not saved, b Nicolas Cage doing what he clearly loves doing. But the movie surrounding him is not worthy of his gleeful insanity.