James Y. Lee
We likely knew this even before Wesley Snipes—in a throwaway cameo that remains among the least putrid things excreted from Deadpool and Wolverine—uttered the sentence, “There’s only one Blade… and there’s only ever gonna be one Blade!”, to the tune of a sardonic fourth-wall break by a gormless Ryan Reynolds. But alas and at last, the open secret is a secret no more. Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali, originally set to be the director and titular star, respectively, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Blade film, have fully departed the project, ending seven years of development hell for a long-anticipated film that has now been banished to the eternal dark. It is a disappointment so great it became Marvel’s lesser equivalent of the eternally delayed Half-Life 3. It is a project that Ali seems to have departed with more than slight resentment after seven years of unfulfilled contractual obligations. It is a cultural void that made it so that Tariq’s last film of note was 2020’s Mogul Mowgli, starring Riz Ahmed. It is also readily apparent in 2026, however, that leaving their Marvel-imposed obligations and Marvel-funded action training unused was never even a passing idea on Tariq and Ali’s minds. Enter Tariq’s latest film—Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a film for which the glib descriptor for it would be the Blade movie he and Ali were destined to make.
The triplicated maternal address of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother— starring Ali as what else but a Muslim hitman whose main method of killing is via an engraved sword—is as much an expression of Islamic faith as it is a moment of devotion to a character grieved by the family that surrounded her. Crucially, it’s a reference to a hadith about serving one’s parents, in which a man approaches the Prophet Muhammad and asks of him, “Who deserves the best of me?” The Prophet responds, “your mother,” repeating it twice more upon being asked again and again by the man, “Then who?”—and only then does he respond, “your father.” With the word of the Prophet in mind, it becomes clear that after the passing of Latif’s (Ali) wife in the opening scene of Tariq’s film, he has great shoes to fill—whose very enormity and sanctity he may not even begin to comprehend.
It isn’t enough for Latif that he has to bear the weight of grief from a loss so great that he silently refuses to bow before God during prayer. Long has he believed himself to be His Sword, the agent of God’s righteousness, even as he serves clients with ethically dubious interests to protect that remain hypocritical to Latif’s piety. But now, the responsibility of the Sword has overlapped with the absent responsibilities of the Mother. Latif finds himself having to look after his three children—Fatiha (Adia), Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and infant Aziza (played dually by Brooklyn and Jaxson Hughes)—all on his own, a task that brings with it the realization that they’re rapidly running out of their mother’s breast milk for Aziza, and more crushingly, the fact that Aziza is allergic to baby formula.
Among the dubious clients that Latif serves is Mike Mahmoudi (Leith Lakli), who has a major problem that needs “fixing.” His cousin, Hatty (Abubakr Ali), is being pursued by a Korean radical born-again Christian pastor named Hwan Yoon (John Cho), an Iraq veteran who claimed to be resurrected after the fervent prayers of his mother, and is now on a cleansing mission to convert sites of “impurity” into churches for his faith. That includes Hatty and his mansion, the result of wealth he’s accumulated off of running an adult-media empire based on hilariously-dubbed “halal” pornography. And so Latif finds himself balancing two missions at once, both of which he pursues with the same relentlessness—a quest to find breast milk for Aziza while reckoning with his presence as a father, and the hunt for Hwan and his forces as they do everything in their power to punish Hatty and clear out anyone who stands in their way.
Stories about assassins with rigorous honor codes stretch back even before the days of John Wick and the Continental’s rules. Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, for instance, remains one of the standouts among them, an influence that Tariq recognized he could transplant the tenets of Islam onto. It’s a combination that may be surprising in terms of its rarity, but Tariq ensures that the synergy he creates between this kind of hitman noir and religious cinema is both thematically enduring and narratively riveting. The violence in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is the kind of R-rated viscerality audiences come to movies like this with ready expectations. Latif’s use of creatively improvised melee weapons on top of his sword makes for creative subversions to the principle of never bringing blades to gunfights, while ensuring that almost all of the combat he engages in will be up close and personal enough to maximize impact. Steered by Ali, the fights are often clumsy, ugly, and brutal, but teeters right on the edge between mudwrestling and satisfying.
But unlike much of the action cinema that Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother engages in ready conversation with, the heart of this film beats with such a great deal of earnestness—not just because of its faith-based angle, but also because of the lightness and wit with which the film carries scenes with Latif’s family. Yes, there is grief shared among them, but there is also laughter and humor—found in moments like when Latif accidentally stumbles on furry porn on Fatiha’s laptop, or in the quips that Qadir is often prone to lobbing at his father and his siblings, or in the frustrating yet comparatively benign medical bureaucracy Latif has to navigate to obtain breast milk for Aziza. It makes it so that when said grief has to be reckoned with—when it inevitably crosses paths with Latif’s violence, when it becomes clear that God’s protection is nebulous, and no one can fill the hole left behind by their mother—the crises of faith hit more powerfully, and ripple across the family in fascinating ways. That sort of development might feel too little too late at points, especially when it feels like for much of the film’s earlier portions, the children can sometimes feel like narrative cargo for Latif to be responsible for—but this family grows in increasingly fascinating ways in due time.
The religious world of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is by far its most astonishing facet. In a movie packed to the brim with such violence, Tariq somehow contains a universal understanding of God and the different means of worshipping Him—which contain multitudes, are prone to exploitation and radicalism, but are all valuable for the sake of their devotion. We see how that community and faith can manifest in Latif’s loved ones, such as Giancarlo Esposito‘s Imam Abdul Malik as a mentor-like fixture, while Tramell Tillman‘s Dr. Talib is a more secularly isolated source of understanding and family. But it also manifests earnestly even in Hwan Yoon, who John Cho electrically portrays with a fiercely crusader-like spirit. He is a man so true in his belief that the Lord is standing alongside him, and so devoted to a culture he believe is responsible for his resurrection, that he even inscribed the trigrams of the South Korean flag onto the flag of his violently radical congregation. He wears golden brace-laden grills, adorning from top to bottom a spangled, jewel-becked cowboy outfit—a fascinatingly antagonistic synergy of the spirit of Korean evangelical Christianity with the wealth-commanding debauchery of megachurch pastors, and the stereotypical yet racially unconventional image of the film’s Texas setting.
Like any of the foremost examples of religious fiction, it is ultimately in the observation of contradiction that Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother finds its greatest source of power. It is also the source of Ali’s incredible performance; we understand through Ali how heavy these contradictions must weigh on Latif’s soul, all throughout the film. How does Latif justify the violence he commits when it is bound to horrify his children, when it brings into danger a religious community already under threat of persecution, when it may even violate the sanctity of life that God provides? In the absence of a mother, what parts of his masculinity—often dangerous and life-taking in its occupational externalization—can turn into something tender and loving for his children? If he is to be saved from a life of hypocrisy and murder, who will be responsible for saving him?
That last particular inquiry is something that the final stretch of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother answers in earnest—in an astonishingly graceful direction that lives up to the religious foundations of Tariq’s film just as much, if not more so, than something charged with apocalyptically furious vengeance, like so many films about religion are wont to do nowadays. There are points where Tariq’s film feels like it struggles to make perfect sense of the narrative balance between religious violence and religious grace, especially in an action-thriller such as this, so full of characters with needs that may not feel entirely fulfilled in such a contained genre setting. And yet, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a surprisingly potent and competent attempt at seeking out that balance, and rooting it in a story about a family under the unknowable will and grace of God. It is a film so fitting for Tariq and Ali’s sensibilities, that for once, the loss of Blade may have turned into an act of providence all on its own.
