With ‘The Boy Next Door,’ Lopez’s acting career hits a new J.Low
Toward the end of “The Boy Next Door,” the toddler behind me started getting fussy.
Setting aside the obvious question of who brings a toddler to an R-rated thriller about Jennifer Lopez sleeping with her teenage neighbor, what the little fella was saying — “Balabalabalabala” — made as much sense as anything that was unfolding onscreen.
Cheap, obvious and lazy, “The Boy Next Door” only gets enjoyably, hilariously awful in its final scenes. In what feels every bit like a Lifetime movie with F-bombs and a modestly higher budget, Lopez’s acting career hits a new J.Low. And this from the woman who thought “Gigli” was a good idea.
Claire Peterson (Lopez), the world’s most glamorous high-school literature teacher, is reeling after her recent separation from her cheating husband (John Corbett). And her only son, Kevin (Ian Nelson), is being relentlessly tormented by a bully (Las Vegas native Adam Hicks). So when Noah (Ryan Guzman) moves in next door to take care of his elderly uncle and befriends Kevin, she welcomes the stranger into their home.
She also starts eyeballin’ his sweaty biceps as he works on his car.
Director Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furious”) and first-time screenwriter Barbara Curry go to great lengths to make Claire seem somewhat sympathetic despite her one-night stand with Noah.
He isn’t 19, he’s “almost 20.” And he looks a good decade older than her son.
On that fateful night, Claire had just bailed on her first date in 20 years, as it was going nowhere fast, and came home feeling vulnerable to drink some wine.
And she offers up some mild protestations and plenty of half-hearted “stops” when Noah begins kissing her, using entirely too much tongue by the way, and dropping some allegedly devastating lines like “No judgment. No rules. Just us.” Which, if I’m not mistaken, is also the new slogan for Outback Steakhouse.
Claire also makes it very clear the next morning that she’d made a horrible mistake, she’d gotten swept up in the moment, and that what happened — in all its sweaty, showing-a-lot-without-really-showing-anything glory — can never, ever happen again.
Still, it’s hard to ignore the double standard at play. If the genders were reversed and, say, Lopez’s fellow “American Idol” judge and part-time actor Harry Connick Jr. were in his underwear and peeking through the curtains to watch his daughter’s teenage best friend strip nude — as Claire does to Noah — it would be skeevy and all but irredeemable.
Anyway, Noah takes his rejection about as well as could be expected for a teenager whose parents just died and is re-enrolling in high school after having “lost some time” because of “an accident.”
In one of “The Boy Next Door’s” sillier moments, Kevin manages to avoid getting any of Noah’s slobber on him when he all but drools, over an offer of baked goods, “I love your mother’s cookies.”
But when he sees Claire spending more and more time with her estranged husband, Noah’s cheesy come-ons give way to some instantaneously psychotic behavior. It’s the sort of generic evil that leads Noah — after threatening her, unwelcomingly groping her in her kitchen a few feet from her family, grinding up against her in the school restroom next to vulgar graffiti he spray painted about their relationship, and papering her classroom with stills from the sex tape he made of them — to ask, “Why are you so angry?”
“The Boy Next Door” — or, as I like to call it, “Boy, How Did This Get Made?” — is produced by one-man low-budget horror movie factory Jason Blum (“The Purge,” “Insidious” and “Sinister” franchises). So we get scenes of Claire cowering with a butcher’s knife, a car’s brakes mysteriously failing, and the inevitable cat jumping out from the shadows.
The final showdown between Claire and Noah is an over-the-top, nonsensical hoot. Had the rest of the movie been that bonkers, “The Boy Next Door” could have been an irresistible guilty pleasure. It’s the classic case of a movie that would have been better if it had been worse.
If anything, the result should leave you looking forward to Lopez’s likely Las Vegas residency. After all, every day she’s performing on the Strip is another day she can’t be making movies like this one.
Because “The Boy Next Door” can be summed up with another of that toddler’s favorite expressions: Ppppfffffttthhhhh!
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.
Review
“The Boy Next Door”
91 minutes
R; violence, sexual content/nudity and language
Grade: D
At multiple locations
