YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is one of those titles that makes sense when you see the movie, but maybe it’s not the best one for getting people to come see it. That’s okay. It’s not really for everybody anyway. But it’s definitely my shit.

How’s this for a selling point: when Mahershala Ali (ROXANNE ROXANNE) finally gave up on ever making the BLADE movie he’d been developing for six years, he reunited with the first director who had been attached, Bassam Tariq (MOGUL MOWGLI), to make an indie movie that would take advantage of all the sword training Marvel had provided for him. You want to see that, right? I sure wanted to see that.

I do think his performance in this might be influenced by how he would’ve played Blade, but it’s really not a BLADE-like movie at all. It’s a totally different thing I also love: what I like to call arthouse badass, though “arthouse” might be overstating it. I’m just trying to describe movies about badasses that are channeling more LE SAMOURAI, POINT BLANK and GET CARTER than, say, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS; crime movies with elements of action, done with a dry, indie drama approach, but cool. Movies like THE AMERICAN, THE LIMEY, DRIVE, RUST AND BONE, REDBELT, DESTROYER, THE KILLER (2023), A VIGILANTE, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD, HAYWIRE, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, EASTERN PROMISES, THE BOUNCER, SPARTAN, HELL OR HIGH WATER, and the king of them is GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which is an obvious influence on this one.

But Ali’s character Latif is less extreme than Ghost Dog. He says he has a code, but it’s just to not use guns, despite a military past. Being a sword-wielding hitman is his sordid secret life, not his identity. His primary concern during the movie is to be a father.

He’s a respected member of his Muslim community in Houston, who has fallen into doing these jobs for a big shot named Mike Mahmoudi (Laith Nakli, SWALLOW), justifying it because they’re bad people (such as a white supremacist). While he’s on a job in St. Louis he gets a call that his wife has died. His daughter Fatiha (Adia, The Midnight Club, Full Circle) and son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara, SHADOW FORCE) are old enough to be fairly self-reliant, but he has to learn how to take care of his baby daughter Aziza. When the supply of his wife’s breast milk runs out he learns that she will only cough up the formula he tries to feed her.

It’s a stressful movie, centering on his attempts to find sources for breast milk for this poor crying baby. Finding mothers at the mosque who can donate some, going to a milk bank, finding out he needs a prescription, and trying to get one from his somewhat estranged physician assistant brother Talib (Tramell Tillman, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING). It’s such an odd, specific problem (inspired, I’ve read, by Tariq struggling to find breast milk while his wife was hospitalized with an infection).

Meanwhile, Mike pressures Tariq to go after a Christian fundamentalist weirdo whose sect is threatening to kill his dumbass crypto-bro nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali, A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE). Pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho, THE FLINTSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS) is a good, colorful villain – a Korean-American combat vet turned cowboy cult leader who leads his group in attacking and “cleaning out” strip clubs and brothels. Never really thought I’d see John Cho doing a redneck accent and wearing a grill in a serious movie.

Hatty runs a Muslim-themed porn web sight out of a mansion that Pastor Hwan thinks (or pretends to think) is a human trafficking operation. Latif shares a religious background with one of them and a war background with the other, but otherwise is completely different from them, shares none of their values, but is stuck in the middle of their conflict. I like that the Christian is the extremist, and I think he’s involved with neo-nazi types, but mostly his beef is about sex stuff that Latif might somewhat agree with. The whole thing is pulpy and nuanced at the same time.

I’m sure there are other movies about American Muslims, but even if I could name some I’m sure they’d be straight dramas. It feels so weirdly new for a movie to acknowledge that there are Americans with American accents whose lives include mosques and hijabs and prayers as well as video games and phones and porn. To have a character get woozy during a fight because he’s been fasting!

I’m interested in the way YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER provides rare representation of a Muslim protagonist, but not in that guarded sort of way where he has to be the ideal, positive example. It does make a point of dismantling the American associations of Islam and terrorism; Latif corrects Qadir’s use of the word “jihad,” and when Hatty calls him “Black Isis” he angrily says, “I fought Isis.” But also he’s a criminal, a killer, a hitman. I honestly like that because I think all cultures should be able to have cool anti-heroes in movies without worrying about setting their people back. Progress!

It does have a nice message about tolerance, because his instincts are pretty judgmental but he ends up having sympathy for Hatty, gets help from a sex worker named Fugazi (Tiffany Boone, DETENTION), and tries to lighten up about the videos he found on Fatiha’s laptop. (Not what you think. Funnier.) I like the scene where they find shelter with their Mormon neighbor Elder Wade (John Henry Ward), take part in his services in order to avoid gunmen, and are able to find common ground with them. At least in this situation, Elder Wade is a nice guy. I’m not sure what he would think about “cleaning out” strip clubs, though.

Also of note: Giancarlo Esposito (NIGHT ON EARTH) plays Latif’s imam Abdul Malik, who seems to be his mentor (including for swords?) and strongly disapproves of this hitman shit. It’s a small but cool role for Esposito.

I want to be clear that this is not an all-out action movie, but it’s closer to one than GHOST DOG is. Ali looks very cool doing his sword practice, gets some good fight moves and one sequence that goes bigger than I expected. I heard a Q&A where Tariq talked about how limited their schedule was compared to what it would’ve been for BLADE, and that the 3 days they had to shoot that sequence was cut to 2 due to troubles with the location. He decided to let stunt coordinator Adam Hart (frequent stunt double for Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling) take charge for that, which seems to have paid off. (And actually two days is generous compared to some of the VOD action movies we watch.)

I think my GHOST DOG comparison is pretty apt, but also a little unfair. I love that movie so much, and it has so many beautiful layers to it, that a new movie has almost no chance to compete. And an interesting soundtrack by Son Lux can never compare to one of RZA’s greatest achievements. So I came out of this thinking well, it’s really good, but it’s not GHOST DOG. I really like it, but maybe I don’t love it.

Then I thought about it more and wrote about it and thought, I wanna see that again. It’s so much about faith and fatherhood, which are not major concerns of mine, but also it’s about seeing Ali in that tough-but-thoughtful mode that made him blow up in MOONLIGHT. This time with a sword! Maybe I do love it. At the very least it’s one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen this year.

Now that I think about it it’s funny that unused period costumes from BLADE were sold to Ryan Coogler for SINNERS, and the sword training was used for this. I was excited to see that movie, but the legacy it ended up having is probly better.