“Bad Moms” mixes sentiment with raunch and ends up vulgar

At least after “Bad Moms,” the results are in: You can’t make a raunchy comedy and a sentimental paean to motherhood at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. Raunchiness or sincerity. Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here.

This is a deeply vulgar movie in a way that an even coarser film like “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” strangely isn’t. What makes “Bad Moms” seem so particularly vulgar is the way its coarseness almost seems forced upon the characters, so that they’re cursing even when they wouldn’t be.

For example, in a speech addressing the PTA, Mila Kunis, as a mother of two, stands at the podium and drops f-bombs on the gathering, as — believe it or not — treacly music on the soundtrack lets us know that she is expressing lovely sentiments.

Perhaps this single line of dialogue sums up “Bad Moms” best, as spoken by Kathryn Hahn as a mom about having kids: “I know we make fun of them, but f—, I love them so much.” That line tells you all you need to know about the limits of the movie’s anarchy and the shallowness of its perception. It’s not nasty enough to be funny, and neither is there a real or true emotion in sight.

Writer-directors Scott Moore and Jon Lucas, who wrote “The Hangover,” find out that, once you involve children, you can’t really do a female version of “The Hangover,” at least not without being a lot more daring than they were prepared to be. Still they try.

Mila Kunis plays Amy, a married woman balancing a career and two kids. Her days start early and late and are filled with working and driving the kids, and cooking. Her husband is a useless slob, and after she catches him masturbating to a nude woman on Skype (“This is mainstream now,” he says in his defense), she throws him out.

In a glancing way, “Bad Moms” touches on a truth of modern parenting, that kids today seem to have every hour filled, with soccer practice and music and language lessons. Gone are the days when kids would come home and watch “F Troop” reruns on television, and the movie suggests that those may have been better times. Oona Lawrence gives a good child performance as Amy’s 12-year-old daughter, a completely wired nervous wreck already worrying about getting into an Ivy League college.

But Moore and Lucas don’t have enough insight to make a serious comedy about parenting. Nor do they have the inspiration to make a full out farce. So they settle for doing a little of this and a little of that, and they end up doing nothing at all.

After seeing the movie, I was surprised that only two people wrote it. “Bad Moms” has the aura of something written by committee, with wild changes of tone every five minutes and with frequent and truly awful musical interludes piecing the disparate scenes together.

The women are game, at least. Kunis, Hahn and Kristen Bell form the movie’s trio, and pry two or three laughs out of the script, but that amounts only to one each. They deserve better, and so do you.

Bad Moms

Comedy. Starring Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn and Kristen Bell. Directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. (R. 93 minutes.)

To see a trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKCw-kqo3cs