*Minor Spoilers Ahead* John Taylor (Morris Chestnut) and Laura Taylor (Regina Hall) are on top of the world in their respective professions. John is a powerful lawyer and Laura is a top-shelf chef. They live in New Orleans in an amazing house but their lives are still incomplete. They long to start a family but they have miscarried 3 times and are down to their last usable embryo. They're trying to get a surrogate and then they come across Anna (Jaz Sinclair). She's 21 and she's a waitress in New Orleans. She comes across as very genuine and Laura takes a shine to her immediately. John isn't quite sure and after meeting her boyfriend Mike (Theo Rossi) he's even less so. Mike is creepy and is very possessive of Anna. But Laura is sure and encourages him to change his mind. Little do they know there's more going on in the shadows. Mike has a plan to extort money from the happy couple and as things progress he gets more and more aggressive toward Anna to fall in line with this plan.
There is no pleasant way to say this, the majority of the plot of When the Bough Breaks has been done before. More than a few times actually, the most recent example in memory being Obsessed in 2009. This would have been okay if they had a way to switch things up or bring a fresh take on it. The surrogacy angle is relatively new but that's basically where the new stuff ends. They needed far more interesting stuff in the side-plots than whether John gets the big case at work or Laura gets the new position. We meet their subordinates for so little time that it is literally impossible to get attached to those parts of the plot at all. The scheme that Mike and Anna cook up isn't fresh, I'll admit it's one of the more interesting parts of the plot but it's also undercut by how telegraphed it is by Jaz and Theo's performances.
The other problem with When the Bough Breaks is the pace of it. The first half of this movie is pretty boring. It's meant to set things up but they slow play it so much that you can't set up any kind of tension. The story comes across as heavily melodramatic and that isn't helped by how bad the dialogue is in spots. The plot does pick up in the second half but that's when it devolves into the more illogical stuff. They keep the cops out of it for stupid reasons, John doesn't tell his wife how Anna's behaviour is changing for no good reason. It has to happen because the plot doesn't work otherwise. The second half does pick up but it gets progressively more and more outlandish to the point where in the final rampage by Anna, she stops because her water breaks. Ridiculous is the word that comes to mind when I think about the ending of this movie.
The acting wasn't all bad but this is the type of movie that doesn't do the actors/actresses any favours. You would think this kind of stuff would be beneath people like Michael K. Williams, Regina Hall and Morris Chestnut. They're all accomplished actors and this movie makes them look like amateurs. But they weren't the worst casualties, Theo Rossi was awful in this movie. I know he isn't a terrible actor, he was solid in Luke Cage but this movie made him look laughably bad. Jaz Sinclair is beautiful but she didn't have the chops to carry this movie like she needed to. She's definitely got potential but she's slightly robotic at the start and when things go south, she can't quite make it work.
I've been pretty hard on this movie but I've seen worse. This is formulaic and that's the long and the short of it. It made money at the box office and we'll end up getting more movies like it in the future. I can't recommend this though, there are better thrillers out there that supply what you actually want from this. There are no thrills to be had here and that was the sole job it had to deliver on.
There is no pleasant way to say this, the majority of the plot of When the Bough Breaks has been done before. More than a few times actually, the most recent example in memory being Obsessed in 2009. This would have been okay if they had a way to switch things up or bring a fresh take on it. The surrogacy angle is relatively new but that's basically where the new stuff ends. They needed far more interesting stuff in the side-plots than whether John gets the big case at work or Laura gets the new position. We meet their subordinates for so little time that it is literally impossible to get attached to those parts of the plot at all. The scheme that Mike and Anna cook up isn't fresh, I'll admit it's one of the more interesting parts of the plot but it's also undercut by how telegraphed it is by Jaz and Theo's performances.
The other problem with When the Bough Breaks is the pace of it. The first half of this movie is pretty boring. It's meant to set things up but they slow play it so much that you can't set up any kind of tension. The story comes across as heavily melodramatic and that isn't helped by how bad the dialogue is in spots. The plot does pick up in the second half but that's when it devolves into the more illogical stuff. They keep the cops out of it for stupid reasons, John doesn't tell his wife how Anna's behaviour is changing for no good reason. It has to happen because the plot doesn't work otherwise. The second half does pick up but it gets progressively more and more outlandish to the point where in the final rampage by Anna, she stops because her water breaks. Ridiculous is the word that comes to mind when I think about the ending of this movie.
The acting wasn't all bad but this is the type of movie that doesn't do the actors/actresses any favours. You would think this kind of stuff would be beneath people like Michael K. Williams, Regina Hall and Morris Chestnut. They're all accomplished actors and this movie makes them look like amateurs. But they weren't the worst casualties, Theo Rossi was awful in this movie. I know he isn't a terrible actor, he was solid in Luke Cage but this movie made him look laughably bad. Jaz Sinclair is beautiful but she didn't have the chops to carry this movie like she needed to. She's definitely got potential but she's slightly robotic at the start and when things go south, she can't quite make it work.
I've been pretty hard on this movie but I've seen worse. This is formulaic and that's the long and the short of it. It made money at the box office and we'll end up getting more movies like it in the future. I can't recommend this though, there are better thrillers out there that supply what you actually want from this. There are no thrills to be had here and that was the sole job it had to deliver on.