Seven years ago, I sat in Hall H with Heidi, my partner Hannah, Taimur, Patrick Meany and other Beatsters, as we did every year in those days, with an eye towards whatever Marvel was going to lay in our laps and fuel the internet speculation economy for another twelve months.
That year, the final one I attended before COVID changed the world for the worse, the big focus was on the upcoming Black Widow. How quaint a thing to recall now. Though the one moment that knocked me back was right at the end when Kevin Feige called the freshly-minted Oscar winner Mahershala Ali up on stage to share the news that he’d be the new Blade for the still-formulating next phase of Marvel’s stratagem.
After filmmaker Bassam Tariq, who had been hired a year earlier to direct, left the production of Blade in 2022, it was only a matter of time before its star would follow suit. Though he hung on for a few years on the shallow hope that maybe the stars would somehow align. But as Wesley told us in Deadpool And Wolverine, “there’s only one Blade. Only ever gonna be one Blade.”
As we know, there’s a lot of preparation that goes into one of these Marvel efforts, especially on behalf of the actors who get into a specific kind of “comic book-ready” shape and undergo some rigorous training. Ali, by all accounts, had no interest in wasting all that effort and decided to reconnect with Tariq on a wholly separate project. Thus, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which finally puts a blade, so to speak, in Ali’s hands.
Since John Wick came out twelve years ago, there have been a number of similarly pitched films centered on unlikely action heroes: Atomic Blonde, Nobody, Novocaine and a bunch you probably don’t know about hiding in the recesses of Tubi. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (which from now on, I’m calling “Your Mother x3″) is the first of these that feels like it’s informed by something much richer.
You see, Latif (Ali) is a devout Muslim, who also happens to be a hitman, trained clandestinely by an elder (Giancarlo Esposito). He’s also a single father, mourning the recent loss of his wife and the mother of their three children, one of whom is an infant very much in need of breastmilk that is quickly running out.
This is the rub: What Tariq and Ali are aiming for isn’t a story of revenge for a wrong done- it’s a story about a dangerous man trying to find the balance between the bloodletting that puts food on his family’s table, the responsibilities of being a father to three growing children, and devotion to his faith. That latter aspect should not be misconstrued as window dressing either- both Ali and Tariq are ardent followers of Islam and that passionate shared belief informs every element of the film, even down to the title, which as audiences learn right away is rooted in multiple hadith (“Who is most deserving of good treatment?”).
As Latif attempts to find nourishment for his baby, he runs into the inevitable road blocks, a lack of breastfeeding mothers at their mosque, the need to get a prescription to obtain a supply from the local WIC office. Then, by chance, a sex worker under the employ of local adult film producer Hatty (Abubakr Ali) ends up providing milk to the child at an unexpected moment, and Latif, in his desperation, begins to seek her out for more.
This search lands Latif square in the middle of a squabble between Hatty and evangelical cult leader Hwan-Yoon (John Cho), whose brand of militant Christianity is the kind with the eradication of pornography in his sights and after taking Hatty captive, his uncle- gang lord and Latif’s regular employer, Mike (Laith Nakli)- enlists the assassin to rescue him.
There’s a much more rote version of this story that could have been produced- one focused on Latif slicing and dicing his way through hordes of bad guys- with the inciting action of needing to feed his child playing as simply a fulcrum point to get this weary protagonist from one set piece to another. Luckily, Your Mother x 3 is not that movie. Instead Tariq pushes much of the criminal escapades into the background, still present and an active threat, but less informative of what the audience is experiencing. Instead this is a story about a father, who’s just trying to do his best in the face of a deeply painful loss and navigating systems that keep failing him, while also wrestling with his inability to work within them.
That’s a much better iteration of this film, and I’m glad it’s the one we got. It’s the small moments that pull everything together like glue, especially in the interactions between Latif and his two older children, teenager Fatiha (Adia) and precocious eight-year-old Qadir (Jahleel Kamara). It’s these relationships- and the occasional trip-ups that lie in wait (Latif catches Fatiha looking at furry porn, Qadir argues back against his father for attempting a looser prayer regimen)- that make this feel like a much more defined and personal effort that can’t be easily shuffled back into the pack of John Wick clones.
And when the narrative attempts to pull focus towards those criminal elements, it feels far lesser in the trying, like they’re coming from another production altogether. Hwan-Yoon feels especially ill-defined and cartoonish, which just betrays all the more what Tariq’s actual interests are here. Thankfully, the action- sparing as it is- is very good and so much else of what occupies most of the running time makes these brief lulls into the ordinary easier to forgive.
But in the end, it’s the spiritual connection that gives Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother the extra push that allows it to linger on the mind longer. “The whole world is a mosque.”
