I immediately appreciate the noir-esque tone the film tries to strike, yet it absolutely tries too hard. The characters are dubious; we don't need over the top modern dialogue and exaggerated social behavior to emphasize how very ridiculously sleazy they are. Stylized flashbacks to illustrate characters' planning pointedly recall Guy Ritchie's crime thriller comedies, or action romp barn-burners like Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Sherlock Holmes' or the 2011 version of 'The three musketeers.' Meanwhile the sheer coarseness, crudity, and attempted wit of the script - along with snappy editing and overlaid text indicating the place or sequential timing of scenes - recall Quentin Tarantino, and the forcefulness of the unquestionably blunt writing suggests deliberate B-movie ambitions.
These are a lot of features, film-makers, and fashions that 'Wolf mother' works diligently to imp. Even the assembled soundtrack feels like an effort to mimic Tarantino's knack for unforgettable paired music by collecting songs that sound like approximations of more well-known tunes. Imagine how much better this could have been if writer-director Erik Peter Carlson tried to make a picture that spoke for itself.
There is genuine story here. There are real characters, with depth and complexities - and arcs, of a sort. There are actual emotional inroads. But these are all downplayed heavily and in a runtime of two hours, we're 45 minutes in before especially unlikable Ben Harper (Kevin Pinassi) meaningfully shares the screen with down on her luck Zelda Nigel (Najarra Townsend). The film treats its plot with astounding lackadaisical indifference, mostly caring little for an examination of the protagonists it could be, or the amateur sleuthing narrative it pretends to be. Instead 'Wolf mother' broadly focuses on the abject raunch of the scenario, characters, and dialogue with apparent intent of being funny. But it's emphatically not.
Then come the last 45 minutes, and everything Carlson has haphazardly built is largely upended with a jarring, abrupt shift in tone and narrative slant. If all the preceding material were engineered more carefully with the final act in mind, then 'Wolf mother' would have been a very different and much better film. While specific technical considerations of the feature are just fine overall, in the last third or so it's like every last bit of film-maker prowess Carlson possesses was poured into the finale as the real weight of the story manifests. Yet even this is marred by a tactless, needless, expressly anti-choice sentiment at the core of one of the lead characters, and an ending so awkwardly unrefined that it feels like Carlson didn't know how to actually finish his screenplay, so he slapped on the most clumsy, ill-considered conclusion that he could.
Maybe the mere fact of their suffering through the dazzlingly inelegant construction of the movie ingratiates the stars to me more than they deserve, yet I do I think Townsend and Pinassi demonstrate fine acting skill far exceeding the value we get here otherwise. They inhabit their roles very well, injecting Zelda and Ben with great personality and more purpose than the screenplay would suggest the parts actually have. Other characters are provided substantially less screen time, and equivalent consideration in how they're written, so the remainder of the cast is rather stuck with what they're given. Still, I like the stars well enough that I think I'd like to see them in more features.
'Wolf mother' is a mess. There are quite a few very good ideas here, and there was great potential in the screenplay. This is all wasted with a rough, indelicate execution that's simply all over the place: attempts at humor that do not land, unrepentant parroting of anything else the film-maker has ever seen, dramatic and emotional beats scarcely imparted with the gravity they deserve, frenetic bursts of action that actively disengage the viewer's attachment, story beats that are sometimes very loosely connected. I genuinely like the performances given by Townsend and Pinassi, however unevenly their parts were written, yet they alone cannot save the production.
'Wolf mother' could have been a good movie. I find myself very disappointed in how decisively it is not.
Not recommended except perhaps for the most open-minded and persevering of audiences.
