They Were Supposed to Make the New Blade . Instead, They Made Something Better.

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I have been a dad long enough now that whatever version of myself I once considered cool now feels like a total fiction. I have two young kids, so most days I’m consumed with being their butler, tutor, chauffer, chef, and more. I love being their baba. I also scroll social media and see some of my childless friends still acting wild and, uh, let’s call it irresponsible, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to have that kind of fun again.

So I think of myself as something of the ideal audience member for Bassam Tariq’s new film Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother , which stars Mahershala Ali doing badass action-movie shit with a baby. The poster shows him wielding a sword with an infant strapped to his chest.

When I went to an early screening in Brooklyn, I overheard someone call it something of a Muslim John Wick . But can we talk about this baby for a sec?

Ali plays Latif, a Muslim in Houston who is very good at his job, which just happens to be killing people. Tariq and Ali were both attached to Marvel’s Blade reboot, which languished in development hell for years, and Ali had trained extensively for it. At times you can almost see the calm and controlled swordplay as a little bit of that project peeking through into existence. For Tariq, I’m sure the prospect of putting all that training to use was too tempting to resist. I can almost imagine myself in his head, working backward to find a way to insert swords into scenes. And I’m so glad he did. The fight scenes are fast, precise, and enormously satisfying.

But the film is not at heart a shoot-’em-up or a revenge picture like John Wick or like anything else I imagined—or hoped— Blade could have been. This is a movie about family, about parents, about motherhood.

The movie starts similarly enough to John Wick , with the hero burying his wife. Latif is left to raise their three children, including a nursing baby who is allergic to formula. Within minutes, Tariq has reduced this frighteningly capable man to a problem no violence or muscle can solve: His daughter’s mother is gone, and the child’s only hope is for Latif to try and fill that void.

Any parent can tell you how hard those newborn months are. I will always remember how it consumed my wife, the way her body was still recovering from giving birth but had an enormous job in feeding the baby. She was barely sleeping. Our house reorganized itself around the baby’s needs. In some fundamental biological sense, it can make the dad feel useless.

Tariq’s experience with his newborn was much more difficult . He told GQ that after his wife gave birth to their first child, she developed a life-threatening infection and ended up in intensive care. Their newborn would not take formula, leaving Tariq running around New York trying to find breast milk for his baby. But even after he finally got his son fed, the baby was still inconsolable. Tariq realized that his own panic was contributing to his son’s panic. When he calmed down, the baby did too.