A 29-year-old slacker (Jon Heder) who still lives with his mother (Diane Keaton) realizes his sweet set-up is threatened when she hears wedding bells with her self-help guru beau. His mother then decides to go to great and bizarre lengths to find her son a wife.
Matters quickly regress into an antic romantic comedy, potentially buoyed by a strong cast but soon thwarted by a screenplay as leaden as it is predictable.
I expected to laugh a lot harder and more frequently. Mama's Boy isn't what I'd call a terrible movie. Instead, it's a movie that assembles a lot of interesting elements that never gel.
The picture is merely series of loose gags stumbling into each other while Heder makes faces, Hamilton spends more time on his soundtrack selections than his storytelling, as the rest of the cast waits patiently for their paychecks to clear.
Mama's Boy is the ultimate, definitive, supremo bad movie, the universal black hole of suckage bad movie, the celluloid anti-Christ bad movie of bad movies -- not to put too fine a point on it or anything.
Things sadly come to a grinding halt when the schtick wears thin and starts to repeat itself.
Toronto Star
December 14, 2007
It's not that the movie is utterly bereft of arresting moments. It's just that each of these prominently features one of the aforementioned supporting cast and not the so-called star.
