“A Netflix Film” has several meanings. For Roma and Okja, it means an auteurist triumph neglected by the major studios and given life and limb by the streaming giant. For Otherhood and others like it, it means a made-for-TV movie. Starring Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett, and newly-anointed criminal Felicity Huffman, it’s a Mother’s Day movie inexplicably dropped in the middle of August. Netflix has a knack for rando release dates and a lack of marketing, but this one takes the cake. It can be guaranteed that if mothers around the world knew about Otherhood they’d watch it and cheer for it ad nauseum. Alas, they don’t, and maybe it’s for the better. Only sporadically funny and chock-full of grating characters to boot, Otherhood is a lame attempt at reviving three careers that have seen better days. Arquette, Bassett, and even Huffman give it all they’ve got, and yet their gifts are not enough. As their New York-livin’ sons, Jake Lacy, Sinqa Walls, and Jake Hoffman are equally daft in different ways. Don’t hate the players though, hate the game. They’re all adequately cast as an estranged gay son, a successful one-night stander son, and a sad-sack loser son, respectively. It’s just that, well, their characters are either uninteresting (Walls), annoying as hell (Hoffman), or clueless in all the wrong ways (Lacy). From script to screen it’s painfully apparent something was lost in translation.
Grade: C-
Film Epoch 