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Since winning two Oscars in three years less than a decade ago, Mahershala Ali has bided his time as one of Hollywood’s great untapped commodities. Not counting some disposable franchise support duty, he’s had only
a fine performance in the gloopy sci-fi “Swan Song” to remind us what he can do, while his proposed succession of Wesley Snipes in a new “Blade” film languished in development purgatory. Following his propulsive fiction debut “Mogul Mowgli,” meanwhile, documentary-schooled filmmaker Bassam Tariq was likewise snagged up in that star-crossed reboot — hardly a fresh enough prospect to hold that much talent in limbo. The very happy upshot of that disappointment, however, arrives with “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” clearly the film that Tariq and Ali were meant to make together all along: a dazzling hardboiled action drama that boasts at least as much lethally fancy swordplay as “Blade,” and significantly more ideas.
Taking the hoariest of premises within the genre — jaded hitman is forced to take one last job — and significantly complicating it with finely drawn family drama and, most unusually and unexpectedly, a nuanced examination of Islamic faith in modern America, Tariq’s sophomore feature scales up everything that was auspicious about “Mogul Mowgli,” from its rich sense of cultural community to its oily, humidly saturated visuals. What that film didn’t foretell was the Pakistani-American director’s fluent command of dizzy action setpieces. With a raw physicality that takes its cue from the protagonist’s principled rejection of firearms, “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is as satisfying a cinematic brawlathon as anything seen in the multiplex of late — and deserves a substantial theatrical audience when Amazon releases it Stateside on Sept. 25, following a Toronto festival bow.
Far from the obscenity you might expect from a film in its genre lane, the striking title instead refers to a well-known Islamic hadith — one that has the Prophet Muhammad answering the question of who is most deserving of our best companionship with “your mother,” repeated twice before anyone else gets a look-in. Quoted over a black screen at the outset of the film, it’s an indication of where its priorities ultimately lie: with family and domesticity, macho action trappings notwithstanding. A brutal opening sequence introduces Latif (Ali) executing a brutal, skull-cracking murder in a public bathroom. A highly skilled contract killer, Latif is also a devoted family man and practicing Muslim who reconciles these incompatible personae with a firm resolve never to use guns — just fearsomely large swords — and to only kill people he deems morally deserving of that punishment.
None of this exactly puts him in line for either Muslim or Father of the Year, but times are tough for the family, who live in a cramped, overheated condo in an unlovely Texan town. They get tougher still with the untimely death of Latif’s wife, leaving him to care for their three children, responsible teenager Fatiha (Adia, in a superb big-screen debut), fanciful eight-year-old Qadir (Jahleel Kamara) and infant Aziza. Reevaluating his priorities in life, he vows to go straight; problem is, killing is his most marketable skill. When his frequent employer Mike (Laith Nakli), a crime boss and fellow Muslim, enlists him to save the hide of his scumbag nephew Haddy (Abubakr Ali), he’s ultimately in no position to refuse.
It’s a job that pulls him into the equally unappealing worlds of Haddy, an online pornographer whose furry-adjacent videos count the otherwise wholesome Fatiha among their viewers, and Hwan Yoon (a gold-grilled, Stetson-wearing John Cho, having a ball), a Korean-American pastor and ex-Marine whose brand of evangelical Christianity is heavy on patriotism and gun worship and light on more humane values. Both men are tussling for the soul of sex worker Fugazi (Tiffany Boone), though Latif has a rather more practical interest in her: She happens to be lactating, and the formula-resistant Aziza is in need of breast milk. The underworld concerns of who owes what to whom are backgrounded in Tariq’s tight, terse script; the urgent, everyday stakes of parental responsibility and survival are pushed to the fore, and the film is all the more compelling for that choice.
Not that “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” doesn’t have a lot of fun along the way. The combat scenes, frequently pitting Latif’s sharpened steel against more popular American weaponry, are staged with whirling verve, wit and, best of all, balletic coherence. Editor Cam McLauchlin never cuts them into mere blitzes of limbs and blood, though DP Katelin Arizmendi’s acidic palette of yellows, greens and corporeal streaks of red does lend the realism a kind of pop-art splendor. A climactic showdown in a sprawling, hideously gilded McMansion is both spectacular and absurd, as Latif is all but impossibly outnumbered against a veritable MAGA army.
But impossible is where the film’s deeper engagement with faith and grace sets in: never dully or piously, but connected, like everything else here, to Latif’s opposing roles as a fighter and a father. To his children, in particular the devout Qadir, he argues for a looser interpretation of Islamic practice and prayer, adjusted to their extraordinary circumstances; he’s surprised by their pushback, as they hold him sternly to account.
Ali is remarkable in a role ideally tailored to his potently still screen presence (potently still, that is, when he’s not in kinetic killing mode), his composure conveying either nurturing calm or cool-blooded danger as the scene requires. And we see that inherited stoic reserve in Adia’s constantly watchful performance, which makes of Fatiha a conscience figure both innocent and weary before her time. These are rare, soulful dynamics to enjoy in a film also at least partially dedicated to the visceral thrills of onscreen carnage; “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” holds these conflicts in balance, and prays on them.
