Starring Mila Kunis. Rated 14A. Now playing

While it’s surely one of the better-performed crap movies of the season, the plotting and direction are so inept in this summer comedy, the intended audience will need to double its Chardonnay dosage to make even the barest sense of Bad Moms.

Mila Kunis plays Amy Mitchell, married young, with two preteens attending a snooty public school in suburban Chicago. They live in a small mansion, even though she works part-time for a hip coffee company, and hairy hubby (David Walton) is a mortgage broker whose career is in escrow. She cooks nonstop for the kids and drives them to school, making her perennially late, despite the predictability of the schedule we’re shown—not to mention the fact that they have three cars and dad has nothing to do but watch porn and drink beer all day.

You have to buy her doing-it-all clichés to get just how frazzled Amy is before finally snapping in the face of one-too-many “emergency” PTA meetings called by local queen bee Gwendolyn (an acidly funny Christina Applegate). You also have to accept that said PTA is 100-percent female, and that its president makes all major decisions for the school. Okay, there is one dad who deigns to drop off his kid in the mornings, and this conveniently widowed hunk of nice-guy man-meat is played by Jay Hernandez, obviously destined to help Amy have more of it all.

Aiding Amy’s belated bid to get real on the school front are Kathryn Hahn and Kristen Bell, as a loud-mouthed troublemaker and mousy good girl, respectively. While these three get to riff about men, sex, and overwork, it’s funny stuff. But the script by directors and noted non-moms Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, best known for writing the Hangover movies, is bigger on raunch than insights into modern motherhood. And the editing and even basic characterization are so incoherent, you have to wonder if the storyline was being changed on the fly.

Stay for the credits, though, and some warmhearted chats between the leads and their real-life mothers.