Celebrate the holidays like a mother.
A Bad Moms Christmas (2017)
Amy, Kiki and Carla – three under-appreciated and over-burdened women – rebel against the challenges and expectations of the Super Bowl for mothers: Christmas. And if creating a more perfect holiday for their families wasn’t hard enough, they have to do all of that while hosting and entertaining their own mothers.
rating 5/10 User rating 2,181 votes 63% ❄ Christmas Connection
A Bad Moms Christmas is set entirely during the holiday season, with Christmas itself serving as the central conflict. The three leads battle mounting pressure to create the perfect Christmas for their families while simultaneously managing their own overbearing mothers. Every scene revolves around holiday obligations, from mall Santas to tree trimming to Christmas morning.
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Our Review
A Bad Moms Christmas (2017) takes the first film's premise and does the obvious thing: adds mothers. Specifically, the mothers of Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell), and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) descend on their lives right before Christmas, turning already-stressful holiday preparation into full-blown generational warfare. It's a comedy sequel that knows exactly what it is and doesn't pretend to be more. That's both its greatest strength and its ceiling.
The Bad Moms Christmas Cast: Three Generations of Chaos
The real reason to watch this movie is the casting of the mothers. Christine Baranski plays Ruth, Amy's exacting, emotionally withholding mother who stages elaborate Christmas displays and judges every decision her daughter makes. Baranski has been playing imperious women for decades, and she's terrifyingly precise here. Every tight-lipped smile communicates a paragraph of passive aggression.
Cheryl Hines plays Sandy, Kiki's boundary-destroying mother who has literally moved into a house across the street. Sandy is clingy to the point of horror movie territory. She shows up unannounced, buys matching outfits, and treats her adult daughter like a companion animal. Hines commits fully to the creepiness, and some of her scenes with Bell genuinely unsettle more than they amuse.
Susan Sarandon plays Isis, Carla's absentee mother who breezes into town to borrow money. Sarandon brings easy charisma to a thinly written role, but she's given the least to work with. Isis is supposed to be the free-spirited counterpoint to Ruth's rigidity and Sandy's suffocation, but the script mostly uses her as a plot device to set up Carla's emotional beats in the third act.
A Comedy That Runs on Chemistry, Not Script
Directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore wrote and directed the original Bad Moms (2016), and they return here with a screenplay that feels like a first draft given the green light too quickly. The original grossed $183 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. STXfilms wanted a sequel fast, and the turnaround shows.
The plot is simple to the point of being skeletal. Amy wants a low-key Christmas. Ruth wants a magazine-worthy extravaganza. They clash. Kiki wants space from Sandy. Carla wants Isis to act like an actual parent. These conflicts resolve in exactly the ways you expect, in approximately the order you expect them.
What keeps the film watchable is that Kunis, Bell, and Hahn are genuinely funny together. Their bar scene chemistry carries over from the first film. Hahn, in particular, is doing something more interesting than the material requires. Her Carla is raunchy and fearless, but Hahn plays the vulnerability underneath without overselling it. She gets the biggest laughs and the one emotional moment that actually lands.
The Christmas of It All
As a Christmas movie, A Bad Moms Christmas commits fully. The holiday isn't background decoration. It's the antagonist. The film understands something specific about the maternal experience of Christmas: that it's largely invisible labor. Buying the gifts, wrapping the gifts, decorating the house, cooking the dinner, managing the expectations of children, partners, and in-laws. All while maintaining the illusion that it's effortless and joyful.
The early montage where Amy tries to create a Pinterest-perfect Christmas before snapping under the pressure is the movie's sharpest sequence. It's funny because it's observed from life, not assembled from comedy-writing formulas. The sight of three women slow-motion walking away from a Christmas tree they've just set on fire has a cathartic energy that no amount of sentimental reconciliation can match.
The mall Santa subplot, where Carla seduces a young, attractive Santa played by Justin Hartley, is exactly the kind of detour this franchise does well. It's absurd, Hahn plays it with zero shame, and Hartley's bewildered sincerity is a good foil.
Where It Falls Apart
The third act collapses into the predictable group-hug ending that the first two acts pretend they're too cool for. All three mother-daughter relationships resolve in rapid succession through tearful confrontations and instant forgiveness. Ruth admits she was too hard on Amy. Sandy agrees to respect boundaries. Isis decides to stick around. None of these resolutions feel earned because the film hasn't done the work to complicate its conflicts beyond their initial setup.
The film also has a pacing problem. At 104 minutes, it's about 15 minutes too long for a comedy this thin. Several scenes run past their natural ending points, as if the editors couldn't bear to cut any improv that made the crew laugh on set. A tighter 88-minute version of this movie would be sharper and more rewatchable.
Box Office and the Sequel That Wasn't
A Bad Moms Christmas earned $130 million worldwide against a $28 million budget. Profitable, but a step down from the original's $183 million. Critics were lukewarm, with a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the planned third film never materialized. The franchise stalled, though its influence persists in the wave of "moms behaving badly" comedies that followed.
Peter Gallagher deserves a mention for bringing quiet dignity to Amy's father Hank, a man who has clearly survived decades of Ruth's perfectionism by perfecting the art of the non-committal smile. It's a small performance in a loud movie, and it works because Gallagher doesn't try to compete with the chaos around him.
Fun Facts
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who wrote and directed A Bad Moms Christmas, also co-wrote the screenplay for The Hangover (2009) and, coincidentally, Four Christmases (2008).
The film was shot in Atlanta, Georgia, between February and April 2017, meaning all the snow and Christmas decorations were entirely artificial in the middle of Southern spring.
Christine Baranski's Christmas party scene required 400 extras, a live string quartet, and three days of shooting for what amounts to about four minutes of screen time.
Justin Hartley filmed his role as the handsome mall Santa while simultaneously shooting the second season of This Is Us, which was airing at the time.
Mila Kunis was pregnant during pre-production of the first Bad Moms and gave birth to her second child between the two films, adding a layer of lived experience to Amy's frazzled motherhood.
The original Bad Moms was initially developed at Paramount Pictures with Leslie Mann attached to star before the project moved to STXfilms and was recast with Kunis.
Kathryn Hahn improvised many of her scenes, including the waxing salon sequence, which was reportedly shot in one take because the crew's laughter kept ruining subsequent attempts.
Cast
