Mother's Day

One day Garry Marshall is going to run out of holidays to exploit with his bland, syrupy romantic dramas with an ensemble cast and what are we going to do then? The New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day director returns with another disaster that insults even its target audience. This isn't a film, it’s a laugh-free sit-com. And it's two hours long. Two hours!

Mother's Day has Jennifer Aniston's divorced mum struggle with jealousy when her husband Timothy Olyphant marries prettyyoungthing Shay Mitchell. She cries on the shoulders of sisters Kate Hudson and Sarah Chalke who do what they can to keep Hudson's husband (Aasif Mandvi) and Chalke's life partner (Cameron Esposito) secret from their racist, homophobic parents (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine). Meanwhile, across town gym owner Jason Sudeikis juggles two pre-teen girls in the run up to the first anniversary of his wife's death (Jennifer Garner).

There’s more. Barman Jack Whitehall dreams of being a comedian and convincing his girlfriend Britt Robertson to marry him, but she’s too wrapped up in tracking down her mother. "I have abandonment issues," she says. Oh, and Julia Roberts is a famous home shopping network presenter selling Mother’s Day gifts…

Despite being two hours long (two hours!), Marshall isn't bothered about disguising the inevitable outcome for his characters. Will Whitehall and Robertson tie the knot? Will the homophobic and racist parents suddenly see the error of their ways? Will Aniston and Sudeikis fall for each other? Knowing the audience will guess the answers to those, Marshall is freed up to get the framing right for that product placement.

The jokes are reheated (the overweight woman can't get out of a chair; an embarrassed Sudeikis buying tampons waits for a price check over the PA system; a bouncy castle deflates on Olyphant) and the movie references lazy and distracting: there are two nods to the first Roberts/Marshall collaboration, Pretty Woman, but thankfully none to their second, Runaway Bride. Whitehall's stand-up routine is painfully unfunny despite the forced guffaws from his audience.

There isn't one moment of originality or emotional truth either. Marshall shoehorns in some tears and cloying sentimentality that even he isn't interested in it one iota. One could pick any number of scenes to illustrate this – like Hudson talking about being all sad and stuff because her family aren't close… while doing her pilates - but one in particular stands out. When one of Aniston's boys suffers an asthma attack and there's panic stations as he's rushed to the hospital, the sequence is intercut with a 'gag' of Sudeikis doing bad hip hop karaoke.

This isn't writing, this is a demographic checklist (as long as the demographic is white and financially comfortable). The only surprise is the sad song/sad montage is shorter than expected. But everything else is cliché ripe for parody: Where's Adam Seltzer and Jason Friedberg with their The Garry Marshall Movie?

Awful.