Producers: Shaun Sanghani, Siena Oberman and Emma Tillinger Koskoff   Director: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte   Screenplay: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte and Madison Harrison   Cast: Hilary Swank, Olivia Cooke, Dilone, Hopper Penn, Norm Lewis, Karen Aldridge, Madison Harrison and Jack Reynor   Distributor: Vertical

Grade: C-

A dreary mixture of crime thriller and domestic melodrama, “The Good Mother” is set in Albany, New York, in 2016 for some reason.  The titular figure is Marissa (Hilary Swank), a reporter with a local newspaper still grieving the death of her husband.  Just as she goes back to work, too soon according to her editor (Norm Lewis), she suffers another blow: her policeman son Toby (Jack Reynor) interrupts a newsroom conference to inform her that her estranged younger son Michael, a drug addict, has been shot and killed.

Marissa gets a further shock when Michael’s girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke) shows up at his funeral with the news that she’s pregnant with his child.  She also tells Marissa that she and Michael were trying to get clean in preparation for settling down with the baby, but that he was still in the drug business with his childhood friend Ducky (Hopper Penn).  The two women form a tense alliance to investigate Michael’s death as Toby and his pregnant wife Gina (Dilone) look on apprehensively, occasionally offering sympathy and help. 

What follows is intended to be surprising and sobering but is instead predictable and ludicrous.  It wouldn’t be fair to reveal plot twists that are intended to be shocking, but the fact is that a character we’re supposed to consider good turns out not to be is such a crude ploy, so obviously acted and directed, that any viewer not seeing it coming a mile away just isn’t watching.  Yet it’s supposed to be a big revelation, and one that’s elaborately played out in a long, remarkably unpleasant sequence (another similarly ugly scene concerns somebody finding a dead body).       

Madison Harrison, who co-wrote the script with director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, takes a small role as Michael in the opening sequence of the film; the choice of part was wise, in that the character is killed off quickly and promptly disappears, except for the photograph displayed at the funeral. 

The other cast members aren’t so fortunate.  They have to continue trying to breathe some life into the rest of the story.  Primary among them, of course, is Swank, who suffers extravagantly as a woman buffeted by multiple tragedies.  It’s not a bad performance, but it’s a one-note turn that grows tiresome over the long haul, and the movie’s ambiguous close, in which her character’s action challenges the accuracy of the title, isn’t likely to satisfy.  Cooke is her real co-star here, and puts plenty of intensity into her role despite its being underwritten.  Among the rest of the cast Hopper overacts and Reynor, perhaps to compensate, is pretty much a stiff.

The film has a drab, dingy look courtesy of production designer Izabelle Garcia and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby, while the editing by Damian Rodriguez and Taylor Levy and score by Joris-Peyrafitte and Eric Slick try, but fail, to give it some energy.  But it remains slack and uninvolving, even in its most propulsive moments, because the characters remains ciphers being pushed around in a scriptwriter’s board game rather than genuine human beings.         

Sad to say, the titular adjective certainly can’t be applied to the movie.

Producers: Todd Garner and Stuart Besser   Director: Clay Tarver   Screenplay: Clay Tarver   Cast: Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena, Meredith Hagner, Steve Buscemi, Carlos Santos, Ronny Chieng, Jamie Hector and Julee Cerda   Distributor: Hulu

Grade: C-

Back in 2021, one could note that while the raunchy, unlikely-buddy farce “Vacation Friends” might be tolerable as a one-time time-waster, it wasn’t something you’d want to revisit.  But of course writer-director Clay Tarver has felt it necessary to cobble together a sequel anyway.  It follows the general rule of such follow-ups: it’s worse than the first, so uninspired Tarver hasn’t even bothered to provide a subtitle. 

Had he done so, it might have been purely geographical.  The first movie was set at a resort in Mexico, where Chicago contractor Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) had brought his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji) to propose to her, though in the second half it moved back to the States for the wedding, which was crashed by Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner), the wild and wacky couple they’d formed an unlikely bond with while vacationing.

It ended, of course, with the four as real friends, which is why Marcus invites Ron and Kyla to join him and Orji at a Caribbean resort the following year.  Ron and Kyla bring along not only their new baby but someone to take care of him while they have fun: Maurillio (Carlos Santos), the laid-back concierge from the Mexican resort where they’d met. 

But Marcus has an agenda he’s keeping hidden from Ron and Kyla: all the amenities they’re enjoying are freebies provided by the Korean firm that owns the establishment, representatives of which will be arriving the following week to consult with him about a proposal to build the Chicago hotel they’re planning.  Of course, though Marcus intends his over-the-top friends to have departed before the Koreans arrive, they show up early, which means that he’ll have to try to prevent them from mucking up his negotiations with the snooty head of the advance group (Ronny Chieng).

As if that weren’t enough, there’s another unexpected arrival: Kyla’s father Reese (Steve Buscemi), who’s just been released from San Quentin after a prison term and looks to mend his bond with his daughter.  Naturally he takes an instant dislike to Ron, and he has an ulterior motive for his visit.  He plans to abscond with five million bucks belonging to drug dealer Warren (Jamie Hector), a stash located in a plane wreck under the sea, which he plans to trick the foursome into helping him recover.  Naturally things go bad, and all five wind up in Warren’s crosshairs.

The movie has points in its favor, but surprisingly Howery isn’t one of them: his brand of broad, over-the-top wackiness, similar to Kevin Hart’s shtick, works best in small doses, and it’s relied on too much here.  The same can be said of Hagner’s brassy vulgarity.  Orji, with her unremitting niceness, pretty much fades into the background.

On the other hand, Santos provides a few smiles as Maurillio tries to deal with his babysitting chores while getting to know young women he gets to meet in the process.  Buscemi brings his customary note of snidely sarcastic edginess to the party.  And Cena proves his comic chops again, especially when Ron subverts expectations, as when he proves an adept Korean speaker.

But even Buscemi and Cena can’t do much when the script moves into comic-action movie mode, with car crashes, gun battles and an escape from a sinking cargo container.  The last act reminds you of the cheesy action movies Cena made when he moved from the wrestling ring to the big screen, and the lesser fare Buscemi has often wasted his talent on.  This sort of stuff has been done far better elsewhere. 

“Friends 2” isn’t awful—it has occasional bright moments, and technically it’s proficient enough, with Hawaiian locations standing in well enough for the Caribbean in Martin Laing’s production design and Tim Suhrstedt’s glossy cinematography; and Tim Roche’s editing keeps things moving at a fairly sprightly clip, with Mark Mothersbaugh’s perky score abetting the rhythm.

But it doesn’t even match the meagre pleasures of its predecessor.