SummaryJohn and Laura Taylor (Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall) are a young, professional couple who desperately want a baby. After exhausting all other options, they finally hire Anna (Jaz Sinclair), the perfect woman to be their surrogate - but as she gets further along in her pregnancy, so too does her psychotic and dangerous fixation on the husband. ... Read More
Directed By:Jon Cassar
Written By:Jack Olsen
When the Bough Breaks
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
28
User score
Generally Unfavorable
2.8
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
28
0% Positive
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
44% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
56% Negative
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
Sep 9, 2016
58
When The Bough Breaks resembles nothing more than a cheap fast-food burger served on fine china: Tasty, sure, and quite enjoyable in the moment. But once the credits roll and the primal centers of the brain stimulated by guilty pleasures like this one return to normal, all you’ll remember is that it looked prettier than usual.
Sep 10, 2016
40
Under the workmanlike direction of Jon Cassar (“Forsaken”), “Bough” breaks little new or inspired ground as it spins out its mildly effective, occasionally silly cautionary tale.
User score
Generally Unfavorable
2.8
15% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
25% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
60% Negative
12 Ratings
12 Ratings
Sep 22, 2016
10
I was hesitant to see the movie. But at the last minute, I said ****'s go see it!!! I was pleasantly surprised. I actually enjoyed the movie. It was great to see a decent movie with an all black cast, without a lot of profanity and no gang bangers and other stereotypes. I was pleased. I would definitely recommend this movie to others. I always like Morris Chestnut. He is a pretty good actor.
Dec 24, 2016
4
It's like a falling tree dropping a seed on the ground. I have to agree with the film critics on this one. Felt like I have already seen this film, but it turned out to be a very familiar thriller theme. It had plenty of issues and the first thing was the main plot in which the story built on. The mother-child connection is a very sensitive matter and that's where the film got stumbled. Even though they wanted to do film on that, they did not convince with the portrayed of the surrogate mother. From the entertainment perspective, it lacked the thriller big. The climax was all the sudden and then it ended just like that. At first I thought it might be a remake, but it was inspired or borrowed the theme from elsewhere. This psychological-thriller focused on to tell the tale of a wealthy childless couple. They decide to hire a young and beautiful Anna to be their surrogate mother. When everything was going very well, Anna's crush on the man she's carrying a baby begin to blow the things off. So now what happens to the couple, Anna and the baby revealed in the final segment. Thankfully, this is not the worst film of the year. I have even worse than this. But this can be easily a skippable one. There's no complaint over the actors, they had given what the characters demanded. Rich in quality, not a bad film from the technical aspect. Those are the area where it got scored a few points from me. If the screenplay had developed well, the film would have been in a different league. Particularly, I did not like the lack of diversity, looked like a black film for the black viewers. There are lots of similar films which are much better than this one that you could try. 4/10
Sep 9, 2016
40
When the Bough Breaks is a very conservative film that ducks any issues that might be dramatically interesting in order to work up lame suspense sequences.
Sep 13, 2016
38
From its New Orleans mansion and penthouse office suites, to its Mercedes and parties packed with haute couture glamour, it presents a vision of aspiration and achievement that Hollywood generally ignores.
Sep 9, 2016
25
While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.
Sep 10, 2016
20
A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.
Sep 10, 2016
20
There’s not an ounce of suspense in any of this, because you’ve seen it all before, and the director, Jon Cassar, seems uninterested in veering from the well-established formula.
Sep 20, 2016
4
They say movies are only as good their villains, and when you have, not only one, but two villains that are as incompetently written and inconsistently performed as this film's. . .well that just about says all that needs to be said about how good it really gets. John Cassar's domestic thriller skimps on the intrigue and suspense, ultimately fulfilling an unintentional result promised by the film's lullaby-inspired title. Yes, folks, just like "Rock-a-bye, Baby," "When The Bough Breaks" will almost assuredly lull you into a deep, dark slumber, even with the most earnest efforts of both Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall bolstering its fallacy-ridden narrative.
Sep 9, 2016
2
Garbage in a nutshell. They take two classical clichés and mix them into total trash that doesn't belong in any theater that is playing this movie. When you blend in elements to make 'When the Bough Breaks', you won't get happy results whatsoever.
Sep 9, 2016
1
I like Morris Chestnut, I've always thought he was a better actor than the movies he stars in. When the Bough Breaks is no exception to that statement. The acting from the two leads is fine but everything else is not. The movie's plot is garbage that tries hard not to be garbage and carries every cliche from "Fatal Attraction" to the equally bad "Obsessed" in it as well.
Oct 4, 2016
0
One year ago, a movie called The Perfect Guy was released. It was enormously cliché and definitely flawed, but it had potential which at the very least made it watchable. Enter When the Bough Breaks, the by-product of a thermonuclear warhead strike on The Perfect Guy. Anything good about The Perfect Guy is now missing from this film. Also keep in mind that this film was released two weeks after Don't Breathe...which was made by the exact same studio. Like Nine Lives, this film is insanely bad. The characters are terrible, the plot is wholly uneventful, and no character emerges as good when everything comes down. For the sake of making a longer movie, the studio probably wanted the movie to operate off of convoluted plot points. Don't bother watching this film. It has nothing to say and nothing interesting to show. It is all a broken promise that was probably caused by that thermonuclear warhead. From the microscopic pieces, the studio not only poorly Frankenstein-ed it back together, but it forgot about all the problems that The Perfect Guy had.
Sep 10, 2016
0
this was plain excrutiating. Can someone at least tell me what the hell's going on in Hollywood lately? This was the dullest experience I have had in the movies so far this year.
Production Company:
- Screen Gems
- Unique Features
Release Date:Sep 9, 2016
Duration:1 h 47 m
Rating:PG-13
Tagline:She's carrying more than just a secret.
Awards
Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards
• 1 Nomination
