Ma Review

While Godzilla is the king of the box office this weekend, there were two other major films that hit theaters this weekend and my plan is to get to all of them because they all looked intriguing. Despite opening in third place among the new releases (and fourth overall since "Aladdin" was the runner-up), it was the horror/thriller "Ma" that was the most profitable of the bunch when compared to its production budget. Even though "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" made the most money, an opening of $47 million wasn't the best when considering its $170 million production budget. Overseas totals helped it with $130 million, but it also wasn't as big in many countries as it was expecting to be. Meanwhile, "Rocketman" will ultimately be fine with a $40 million production budget, but it only opened to $25 million, half as much as "Bohemian Rhapsody" did last year. Meanwhile, Blumhouse scored yet another win as "Ma" made $18 million on just a $5 million production budget. Low-budget horror films that sprint past their budget early on is Blumhouse's specialty. The reason why "Ma" did so well was that they had this genius idea of casting Octavia Spencer as a creepy psychopath, which is totally not her normal thing. Personally I was on board the second I saw a trailer.

Despite this being one of those trailers where I immediately needed to share with all my friends, I also had a bad feeling that I had just watched the whole movie in the trailer. I crossed my fingers that I was wrong, but unfortunately I wasn't. Thus this makes for a bit of a tricky movie to talk about. I could say that you should go see the movie and we can come back and talk, but the disappointing thing here is that this isn't a movie worth seeing. So I'm going to do my best here to talk about this without spoiling too much, but I might be forced to dive a little further into the movie than I would normally like to, given the movie that was presented to me. I'm just going to throw that out there and you can do what you want with that information. As advertised, this movie follows a group of teenagers who are wanting to go out to drink and party. Because, you know, that's all that teenagers do these days right? Go to school, then go home and get drunk. OK, maybe not in the real world. But that's all they do in this world. And these teenagers have found the perfect person to facilitate this. Octavia Spencer's character named Sue Ann, who we simply refer to as Ma. The problem is that there's a lot more to Ma than these teenagers realize, which gets them into a lot of trouble.

Me describing that plot to you shouldn't be that big of an issue. But that's the thing. There's almost nothing to this movie. It's like someone had a great idea for a movie, but when they went to write the screenplay, they only had enough story to fit a short film, so they stretched it as far as they could. Yet I think they stretched the wrong part of this movie. The movie is only around 100 minutes long, but for some reason they decided to take forever to set this up. There's a lot of drama with our main girl named Maggie moving into a new city. They have to play out the drama with her parents. They have to set up her with a new group of friends. The friends have to spend a while figuring out where they are going to drink. When they finally get to Ma's house, they have to build up that relationship to make the friends trust her. This includes not going back just once, but multiple times to the house. Then we have to get to the point where the whole school loves going to Ma's house. Then we start to slowly introducing suspicious activity from her with the main teenagers slowly starting to not trust her. Then amidst all of this we also spend a ton of time setting up Ma's backstory with a series of flashbacks that slowly describes why she is off and my goodness this movie had the wrong focus.

I kid you not, it wasn't until like the last 20 minutes of the movie, maybe further, that the kids finally get trapped in the home and Ma starts to do super crazy things. Yet that was most of the advertising. Given the unbalance here, I don't even blame the people in charge of the advertising. Are they supposed to advertise something that is as boring as tar for 70 minutes with little to nothing of great importance happening? In fact, I commend them for coming up with a fantastic trailer from a movie that offers so little. Maybe the people in charge of the trailers should've been the people in charge of editing the film itself. As I see it, there's another horror/thriller of this style called "Don't Breathe" that did this right. The kids make it to the house of this crazy old blind man within the first 20 minutes of the film, then the rest of the film is them trying to figure out how to escape. They didn't spend half of the movie setting up all of the characters and building this group of friends. The movie also spent very little time setting up the blind man or how the kids got to the point of being at his place. It just all happened. They were already friends. They made a decision to go rob a blind man. Then they spend the rest of the movie trapped in his house. Boom. That's it.

Had "Ma" copied that style with their movie, this could've been a fun and intense horror film. Cut out most of the crap in the first half of the film and just have a group of friends discover a nice lady who is willing to buy them beer. The kids might be dumb enough to go to her house just once to party, but have that be it. Make them get so drunk and wasted that they all kinda fall asleep or whatever, maybe Ma secretly poisons their drinks with some sort of sedative that quickly puts them to sleep, then before they know it they are trapped by Ma. They wake up and they are tied to the couches or poles with the house all locked up and no way to escape. Doing that would allow you to dive deeper into the actual horror/thriller elements of this. There's more room for crazy twists and turns. Maybe have one of the kids get killed or badly injured early on to set the tone of this not being a safe place. If you absolutely need Ma to have a backstory, perhaps she briefly explains it at some point, telling them why she's kidnapped them specifically. That would give Octavia Spencer time to shine because she's having an absolute blast with this role, but doesn't really have anything to work with. Some of the kids could've also had a breakout role with a better screenplay, but they're held back, too.

The other problem here is the tone. If this movie would've been completely self-aware of the fact that it was a silly horror film where kids get trapped by a crazy woman in her house, I could've suspended disbelief enough in order to have a good time with this. But as is, they tried to be super serious and realistic with this. Because I had nothing better to do with my time as the movie had a horrible time getting my attention, I spent my time nitpicking. The tone that they ended up with was more along the lines of a crime drama thriller rather than a horror film. Given that I've watched over 300 episodes of "Criminal Minds," I know what I like when it comes to that style and this movie missed that mark by a mile. The traumatic experience that Ma has in her younger years isn't crazy enough to justify the actions she takes later. Said experience is really kinda bogus in the first place. If we blindly accept that, it wouldn't turn her into serial killer based on that alone. But then she's not broken enough in the present day to just randomly flip a switch and committing these extremely over the top crimes that are only there for the sake of shock value. And then she's able to successfully convince a high school full of kids that spending hours at her house is a great idea? None of it made any sense, which I found frustrating.

When I try to figure out what went wrong here, I'm certainly not going to point any fingers at the cast of the movie. Octavia Spencer is brilliant in this movie. The fact that she always plays such a lovable character in her movies makes this even more fun. I even liked some of our high school cast. Diana Silvers playing our main girl Maggie is great. Some of her friends are annoying, but Andy, played by Corey Fogelmanis, and Darrell, played by Dante Brown were both solid. This means the pieces were in play here. But then I look at the director and I see Tate Taylor. Yes, he's made good movies. He directed "The Help" and that got a best picture nomination. But he also directed "The Girl on the Train," which was another thriller that was a boring mess. So maybe this is just not his genre. And the screenplay was written by a guy named Scotty Landes who had not even written a screenplay for ANY feature-length film before this. So there you go. A great concept and some great performances elevating this higher than it deserved, but a writer and director duo who had no idea what they were doing. I didn't hate this movie, which is why I'm going to be a bit nice with my score, but I just saw so much potential here that got wasted, hence my disappointment. My grade for "Ma" is a 6/10.