Mahershala Ali finally got to swing a blade on screen. Just not for Marvel.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother had its world premiere in Toronto on Saturday night, ahead of a theatrical release on September 25 through Amazon MGM. Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim contract killer who goes on the run across Houston after his wife dies suddenly, dragging along his teenage daughter, his ten-year-old son and a newborn who needs breast milk. He's chased by his own boss and by a militant church leader played by John Cho, whom Variety identifies as Hwan and The Hollywood Reporter calls Haun Yoon. Either way, he's an anti-pornography crusader with a gun and a grudge.

The Blade That Never Was

The backstory here does a lot of the work. Marvel hired Bassam Tariq to direct Blade back in 2021, with Ali already cast in the title role. Tariq stepped away from directing duties in 2022 as the production kept slipping, staying on as an executive producer. The Hollywood Reporter reports the film was eventually dropped from Disney's release slate altogether in 2024. By July this year, per Variety, Ali confirmed the project was dead for good. He'd already spent more than a year on martial arts training for a role that no longer existed.

That training didn't go to waste. Tariq came to him with the script for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, and Ali said yes. "There's something very special in working with my children in the film," he told the TIFF crowd during the post-screening Q&A. "The experience, the part, it's all a bit of an emotional blur. And I'm still learning about it."

To The Hollywood Reporter, Ali put it plainer: the film checked "an action, movement, physicality box" he'd been "yearning" to hit. Shooting lined up right after Ramadan, which he spent fasting and still training in Los Angeles. He credited stunt coordinator Adam Hart with pulling together the fight choreography in a tight window. "I'm so blown away with what he was able to choreograph and pull off," Ali said.

Adia, who plays his rebellious teenage daughter and is being singled out as the film's breakout, said Ali made the emotionally difficult scenes easier to reach. "He really gave me the space to share myself off camera and on camera in a way that I'm not sure a lot of people get," she said.

Tariq, for his part, has said the film grew out of his own experience of new fatherhood and the feeling of not being enough as a provider. That's a long way from a Marvel tentpole, and maybe that's the point.

Ali isn't done with action work either. He's currently shooting season two of HBO's Task, which began filming in July, and he's teased there's physical work in that too, just of a different kind. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother hits theatres September 25. Whether the Blade sword skills ever get a superhero outing is still an open question.