Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 10.13.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Mahershala Ali anchors this with flinty grace, and Adia Joëlle matches him beat for beat; their father-daughter dynamic is the movie’s beating heart. Around them swirls a maximalist cocktail of religious rivalries and vigilante zeal that plays like “we fall down, but we get up… blasting,” and that’s where the contrivances show. The militant evangelical angle, in particular, feels engineered more than observed, and the ending doesn’t fully earn its sermon. Still, the craft is sharp, the action lets Ali flex those knife-fighting chops, and the family thread makes it worth the ticket.
Full review — contains spoilers
Mahershala Ali is excellent here, and Adia Joëlle was amazing as his daughter. The family story worked especially well thanks to the two of them. I had trouble buying some of the contrived conflict and didn’t think it entirely earned its ending, but I enjoyed this quite a lot.
Ali plays a religious Muslim hitman in conflict simultaneously with grifters at the local masjid and a militant charismatic Christian praise and worship team that is using violent means to take down pornographers they accuse of sex trafficking, including one of the hitman’s former mosque students. If that sounds like a lot for one sentence, it was a lot on screen. But it is what it is.
I know religious extremists and violent militias of all flavors exist, but this terrorist evangelical praise group felt a bit contrived. Basically: “We fall down, but we get up…blasting! Our AKs stay ready…for Jesus!” 😆
There weren’t many people in this plot whose moral position made much sense to me. I can go along with an outrageous thriller, but I didn’t think the religious framing worked, especially towards the end.
I honestly feel like this plot and premise were put together simply to give Ali a chance to use the blade and knife skills he learned for the Blade reboot that Marvel refused us.
All that being said, it’s technically very well done. I liked the relationship between Ali and Adia quite a lot and would have been happy spending more of the movie with them. My problems with some of its choices didn’t keep me from caring about the family or enjoying what I was watching.