No one really wants to talk about religious rage, the complex resentment when you feel your God has abandoned you: We like our faith to be tidy and count-your-blessings clean, not clouded with doubt and fury. In writer-director Bassam Tariq’s action thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Mahershala Ali plays Latif, a Houston, Texas, hit man who’s also, ostensibly, a devout Muslim: He strives to be a man of faith even as he’s breaking bones (and more) in the name of Allah. Then his wife dies suddenly, making him a single dad with three kids to care for, teenager Fatiha (Adia), her younger brother Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and an infant, Aziza, who can’t tolerate baby formula; only her mother’s breast milk will do, and supplies are quickly running out. That’s a workaday problem Latif has got to solve, and prayer takes a backseat to his feelings of betrayal. “You take her from me,” he rages in voiceover, “and you expect me to bow down to you?”
A crisis of faith and a desperate search for breast milk: As plot drivers go, that’s a pretty novel combination, but Tariq and Ali pull it off here. The tone is equal parts sacred, profane, and comical. Tariq opens the film with a skull-crushing action sequence in which Latif, dressed in swirling robes, beats the heck out of a baddie in a public bathroom; the sequence is exhilarating and brutal, not least because Ali, wrapped in quasi-Samurai warrior garb and wielding a menacing knife, makes such a dashing, beguiling figure. When his wife dies, he realizes his priorities must shift toward his family, but he can’t free himself from his longtime boss Mike (Laith Nakli), who has a special job for him: Mike’s porn-king nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali) is being harassed by a (Christian) religious fanatic, Pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho). Can Tariq take care of that? He can—but meanwhile, baby Aziza is yowling with hunger, and it turns out that a sex worker formerly in Hatty’s stable, Tiffany Boone’s Fugazi, is lactating and has a bountiful supply of what baby needs. If Latif’s life of spirituality mingled with bloody violence seemed complicated before, it has now entered the realm of the surreal.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is most entertaining when it indulges its tawdry side. Hatty, with his tacky sex mansion and bevy of “halal-certified” cuties, is a particularly clever invention, and Cho, decked out in spangled western shirts and sporting a row of gold teeth, appears to be having a blast as a sleazy operator who’s more interested in power than in Jesus. The action sequences are sharp and swift. In his quest for milk, his tiny daughter strapped snugly to his chest, Ali’s Latif is a new kind of action hero. (Some of the movie’s visuals echo the climactic baby-rescue scene of John Woo’s magnificent Hard Boiled, in which Chow Yun Fat descends the wall of a multi-story hospital building while fending off a hail of bullets, even as he cradles a gurgling mite with one arm.)
But Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother also tangles with complex issues of faith. It’s clear that Latif’s daughter Fatiha, who breaks fast when she shouldn’t and has a crush on one of the family’s young Mormon neighbors, is straying from the path. But the movie doesn’t judge her for it. The suggestion is that doubt is part of faith—you can’t have the second without the occasional tension of the first—and even Latif will have to face that crisis.
The Pakistani-born Tariq previously co-directed (with Omar Mullick) the 2013 documentary These Birds Walk, and he was one of the filmmakers in talks to direct the ill-fated Marvel reboot of Blade, with Ali set to star. In a world where blessings, even mixed ones, are sparse, it’s not a terrible thing that Ali was saved from potentially being chewed up by a Marvel vehicle; he’s a superb actor who deserves better, and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother gives him plenty to work with. The movie’s title refers to a hadith in which a man approaches the Prophet Muhammad and asks, “To whom should I give the best of me?” The prophet’s answer, so emphatic he repeats it three times, is “Your mother”; only when the man asks the question for a fourth time does the prophet respond, “Your father.” As Latif, Ali captures the spirit of the movie’s title: he seems powered by a contradictory blend of male privilege and humility. Early on, he sees, as if for the first time, the little notes his wife had left all over the house, reminders for herself and the kids of all the minuscule things that need to be taken care of in a household. She had handled all these tasks quietly, and seemingly with ease. Now those things—essentially women’s work—are left to him, including sustaining an infant who needs something he can’t provide.
As Latif, always spoiling for a fight, Ali swaggers through the film. But there’s another man inside, a gentle, God-fearing one, and that’s the one you see in the somber beauty of Ali’s eyes. Out of necessity, Latif needs to reconcile with his feminine side. Suddenly, he’s both father and mother, and he finds that filling the role of the latter is the greater challenge. It’s the tenderness he carries within that makes Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother both distinctive and thought provoking. The thrills are just a fringe benefit.
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