Helicopter Mom

Nearly everything about this movie looks like it was made by 2nd graders.

Starting with the obvious, the script is incoherent, unoriginal, unfunny and vacuous.

The person who directed this clearly was grasping at straws, and to allow the lead character to act so way over-the-top showed very little skill of the craft.

The acting by everyone (except the father) was a joke. It looked like bad dinner theater acting.

The sound was not good and uneven. Some parts of the film were inaudible and the dialogue lost. How do you let that happen (unless, of course you're a 2nd grader)?

I'm assuming this film was shot for 40-50k by film students in an attempt to raise money to try and make something bigger. However, I highly doubt this effort by those involved will lead to anything other than than an unemployment check or a job offer at Dunkin Donuts serving up flavors of the day.

THIS is what you call AMATEUR HOUR.

"Helicopter Mom" is a film that boggled my mind as I watched. I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Nia Vardalos was tired of being a celebrity and simply did this film to destroy her career...her performance and character were both THAT bad. Now she was wonderful in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" as well as in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding II"...but here she is simply someone I hated with every fiber of my being...and I am actually shocked I completed the movie. I assume it's because when she wasn't on the screen, the picture was actually pretty good...but that wasn't often enough.

Vardalos plays Maggie, a single mother whose every thought and action is about her teenage son, Lloyd (Jason Dolley). She constantly embarrasses him and behaves in a way like no mother on the planet...and is extremely cruel and self-centered throughout this. For instance, she HOPES that he's gay because that way no other woman will come between them...and then publicly outs the boy at school and signs him up to compete for a gay scholarship. There is, by the way, no evidence that he's gay...none. She just hopes he is for her own deranged and selfish reasons. She doesn't stop at embarrassing him for this...it's pretty much constant. To say this is a one-dimensional and broadly written character is a HUGE understatement!!

When the camera is NOT on her, the film is rather nice. Dolley is very good as her meek son and his scenes with his girlfriend are very sweet. I'd actually like to see more of this actor...just never, never, never in the same film as Vardalos.

Overall, a difficult movie to like and one I hope never to see again.

The writing felt like this could have been a script written by a non-film major in a screenwriting class at a local community college. It is riddled with some of the worst dialogue I have ever heard in a film. And then you have Nia Vardolos; she was so over-the-top that one has to wonder if she was binging on drugs or alcohol during the filming of this. I was in utter disbelief at how bad and rotorless this film was.

Helicopter Mom is idiotic, annoying, patently unfunny, and blatantly homophobic. It is in many ways a film from a different and far worse era. Head-to-toe it plays like a lackluster piece of late-90s teen sit-com drek. The film isn't even remotely relevant and it overflows with dated references. Then there is the issue of the film's central plot: that a mother would be so aggressively separated from reality to determine that her son is gay before he has even reached a conclusion. It is ridiculous and disgustingly offensive. At every turn it simplifies a whole crop of people, defining them by nothing more than who they love, and aggressively stereotyping them along the way. As if this weren't enough to stop watching, it then cripples its characters with dialogue that is unrealistic and clumsy.

There are so many elements of Helicopter Mom that make it a failure. It is a lazily shot made- for-TV movie that certainly won't find an audience with any demographic. The script is written with the skill of a second-grader with no sense of character knowledge, spinning about with a dizzying amount of unmotivated character shifts. There is no consistency to anything and large sections of the film are absolutely incoherent.

The film is so mired in a quagmire of sub-mediocre drivel that it can be considered nothing but forgettable. The best thing that can be said about Helicopter Mom is there's an ending, unfortunately it comes ninety minutes too late.

Stupid movies come out all the time. There are bad films on gay related subjects. But this one had the imprimatur of the Points Foundation which is a group that gives scholarships to deserving LGBT youth. Very important because there are a lot of gay kids still subject to bullying which tends to stifle education. Believe me I know.

There could probably have been made a serious film on that issue, but the producers of Helicopter Mom opted for a truly bad, not only bad, but insulting comedy. In a plot borrowed somewhat from the 80s Soul Man, this overbearing Mom played by Nia Vardalos decides that her son Jason Dolley has to get a scholarship from somewhere to afford college in the East. So what to do, but out him with some of the usual results gay kids face. She even tries to find him dates.

In point of fact the kid is in the category of questioning. We all develop our sexuality at our own pace. A topic that also could have been handled better.

Here in my city I support the Embrace WNY group and it's annual brunch which among other things also provides scholarships for deserving LGBT youth. I think the talent there among those who sponsor and participate could come up with a better film.

They couldn't do much worse.