Wednesday Review: When the Bough Breaks

(note: I’m always a bit reluctant to comment on racial politics, as a white male, but it does seem significant here as this is a movie with a primarily black cast that received mainstream advertising. While the movie mostly avoids stereotypes, I am a bit concerned that it might go in the opposite direction into cultural white-washing. I’m hardly the best person to judge where the safe zone between these two extremes lies, and it’s hardly the responsibility of PoC to meet my expectations of what they should and shouldn’t be, but this is something that I noticed and felt I should mention.)

When the Bough Breaks is one of the greatest disappointments I’ve seen in quite some time. It had an absolutely thrilling trailer that had me hyped. Even as a pro-choicer, the idea of a surrogate threatening a pregnancy as a tool of extortion is scary to me. It’s the same fear as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: the fear that you trusted your child to someone evil.

It’s a shame that the movie can’t live up to the hype of that trailer. This isn’t exactly a case of dishonest marketing. Rather, the movie fails at every aspect that can’t be shown in three second clips. The characters are either flat or inconsistent, the plot relies on both heroes and villains acting like utter morons, and every single plot point and emotion is told to us in mind-numbing detail rather than shown.

The movie has all the subtlety of a sack of bricks applied directly to the face. The couple wants a child, so scene after scene has them admiring children in public, or admiring items in stores intended for children. We also get constant displays of conspicuous wealth, because apparently the horror genre didn’t learn from the first Purge movie that people don’t relate to the fabulously wealthy in peril.

The movie doesn’t really seem to know what kind of villain it wants in Anna, the surrogate. It’s not that she comes across as complex or nuanced, it’s as if she comes across as all over the map in terms of motivation. In some scenes she’s sociopathic, in others she seems to be as much a victim of her own circumstances as the couple. The only consistent trait is that she seems to be an idiot, which may be her, or may be the writers.

The final confrontation is driven entirely by the stupidity of both the heroes and the villains. On the one hand, our protagonists somehow fail to realize that their problems could be solved with a quick call to the police. On the other, Anna manages to put herself in a position where she could be stopped by a quick call to the police. It’s as if the characters made some kind of truce, “I won’t do the smart thing if you don’t.”

So, no, I don’t recommend this movie. There’s nothing to recommend. Even as a bad movie it fails, because if I wanted shallow characters, delivering ham-fisted exposition, in a plot that makes no sense, I’d rent a Kirk Cameron film.