IN this year’s celebration of the mercantile insanity called “Mother’s Day”, a cast of high-strength Hollywood names wallows in a farrago of comedic, emotional, behavioural excess.

Jennifer Aniston plays Sandy, mother of two small boys, divorced from Henry (Timothy Olyphant) who arrives to tell Sandy that he’s just taken a trophy bride. Kate Hudson plays Jesse, mother of a babe conceived by IVF ‘cos her partner’s lesbian. Jason Sudeikis plays Bradley, a widower with two daughters. What childless Miranda (Julia Roberts), spruiking costume jewellery on a TV shopping network, is doing in a mothers’ movie will be revealed.

Tom Hines and Lily Hollander gave director Gary Marshall a screenplay for which the guiding mantra seems to have been “Make ‘em laugh at every sequence, whatever the cost”.

Hector Elizondo as Miranda’s agent, Margo Martindale and Robert Pine as Jesse’s grey nomad parents, and Jake Whitehall as Zack, seeking fame as a stand-up comedian, do their best to provide moments where that criterion works, but by then a film reeking with predictability, soaked in clichés, populated by characters battling vicissitudes that their personalities have difficulty handling, is beyond resuscitation.

At all cinemas