THE MOTHER

Jennifer Lopez stars in this misguided action thriller about a retired military sniper who comes out of hiding to protect her daughter.

RUNNING TIME: 116 minutes

RATING: 1 star

BY REX REED THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND

They said she was a flash in the pan. That was 25 years ago, and Jennifer Lopez is still running in place. Most of her movies are one and the same, but some of them are surprisingly entertaining.

The Mother is not one of those. It's annoyingly lumpy, shockingly pedestrian, and instantly forgettable. It’s also disturbingly and relentlessly bloody, as New Zealand action director Niki Caro lovingly trains his camera on J-Lo as she shoots, stabs, breaks one of her victims' windpipe, and slashes another man's throat to raw hamburger with her fist wrapped in barbed wire.

Glaringly devoid of any originality whatsoever, it even includes a bloated sequence in which the star crashes down stone staircases of an ancient city the way James Bond always does. (This time the setting is Havana, Cuba, and don't ask what she's doing there because they seem to be making it up as they go along.)

J-Lo's prey is always male. At the screening of this film I attended, the women in the audience applauded with vigor every time another man ended up in the morgue, which says more about the time we live in than it does about one movie's faults and shortcomings.

A generic bloodbath with all the cliches of a dozen action revenge thrillers boringly intact, The Mother is preposterous, violent, and over the top as it showcases J-Lo as a curvaceous former military sniper forced into retirement by the gangsters she double-crossed a dozen years earlier, but don't count that as a reason to applaud her feminine heroism.

The threadbare plot reveals in her former life as a killer turned FBI informant and she was little more than basic sexpot trash who slept with assorted thugs and had a baby by one of them before turning him over to the feds. Understandably sore, he stabbed her in her pregnant belly, but the baby somehow survived, only to be given up for adoption and placed in a government protection program.

Now 12, the child is targeted by J-Lo's old enemies as a pawn to lure "the mother" out of hiding and into the barrel sights of their A-14s. So, the chase begins, with Gael Garcia Bernal and Joseph Fiennes hopelessly miscast as psycho arms dealers stalking J-Lo and her kid from the heat of Cuba to the icy slopes of Alaska, where the whole thing ends predictably on snowmobiles.

Never mind that 007 did it first. Somebody did everything J-Lo does in this rehashed cinematic gumbo first, in better movies than The Mother