Can a film that never got made still end up with spinoffs? It’s a question with a seemingly obvious answer, but as a strange counterargument, we’re now on to the second offspring of Marvel’s confounding failure to get their Blade film made. First up we had Sinners, inheriting the costumes from when the doomed MCU project was a period piece, and now we’ve got Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which reunites once-mooted Blade director Bassam Tariq with star Mahershala Ali, and lets Ali go to town with a bunch of, well, blades. Your Mother… certainly doesn’t hit the heights of its half-sibling, lacking the sheer bravado of Ryan Coogler’s filmmaking, but it’s an intriguing spin on the action genre that finds its greatest strength in a hyper-specific vision of modern Texan violence.
Ali plays Latif, a devout Muslim hitman in Houston who only uses bladed weapons – never guns – for his kills. It’s a hypocrisy (a front of earnest faith masking a man who murders for money) around which he’s somehow managed to build a stable life with a wife and three kids. When his wife suddenly dies, though, a lot of debts come due. Latif’s old boss wants him to kill heavily armed, charismatic Korean-American fire-and-brimstone Christian preacher Pastor Hwan (John Cho) on behalf of his porn producer nephew, his daughter Fatiha (Adia) is having to grow up way too fast and is getting into furry porn, and he’s running out of breast milk for his formula-allergic baby.
You could never accuse Your Mother… of a lack of originality in either its plotting or core character designs – you’ve never quite seen an action hero that looks like Latif and you’ve certainly never seen a villain that looks like Pastor Hwan, a mix of Texan Evangelism, military pride, and Deep South rap aesthetics. It’s this consistent sense of seeing something new (it even offers Giancarlo Esposito a role that isn’t his usual unflappable schemer) that keeps things ticking along even as the story starts to lose its grip.
In the early chaos of trying to be a father and a killer, there’s an intense urgency to Your Mother…, but this starts to fade when the stakes fail to rise. Latif never seems in danger of actually losing a fight and (though I do understand the instinct to dodge this) the baby’s health never hits any real crisis point and I did find myself drifting away from the tale, particularly as, novelty aside, the action is rather plainly executed.
It ends up being much more interesting just seeing Tariq’s take on Houston (the writer-director moved there when he was 11) than indulging in machete-vs-machine-gun violence, which is odd but not entirely unwelcome. Tariq shoots the city with a mix of unease and beauty, uncomfortable angles making the rooms Latif inhabits feel claustrophobically close even as warm, lived-in colours pop off the screen. The writing is less surefooted than the visuals, though, veering between tones (there are points where it feels like a Righteous Gemstones episode without enough jokes) and offering up a pretty strange worldview when it comes to women – mirroring its characters’ Madonna-whore complexes without apparent irony.
There’s also moments that strain credulity – this is apparently a world in which the police simply don’t exist – but that does end up feeding into the mystic, parable-like atmosphere that Tariq creates, one in which characters’ faith and prayers are met with tangible results. There is no shortage of ambition or original ideas in Your Mother… and it is undeniably exciting to see what was once an MCU film spark something this earnestly and defiantly creative and personal, but its vision often exceeds its reach.
