The Mother (2023) review

A war veteran and sniper (Jennifer Lopez) offers one too many taco flavored kisses to both merchant of death Hector Álvarez (Gael García Bernal) and former Special Air Service soldier Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and is involved in arms smuggling, becomes pregnant, irritates the Feds because several of their agents are killed (she's an informant), gives birth to her daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) but has to put her up for foster care and then flees for Alaska to work; twelve years later the two Bad Men (and their goons) are determined to kidnap her child and wipe her out.  I'm going to be polite and say the script (credited to three individuals) could have used a re-write or four, since it's lacking in every single dimension aside from star power: it feels like a jumbled and gender-swapped "reconstruction" of Taken only with well-shot tropical and snowy settings ... and the actually compelling part of the narrative took place before this even begins.  Some have mentioned that it's "really" about the "matriarchy" taking control over the rogue "patriarchy," but that kind of "trendy" reading requires a more robust text ... not scribbles in the margin of a notebook.