By Kyle Osborne
I realize that a lot of people think that critics just live for movies like the Jennifer Lopez debacle, “The Boy Next Door,” but the truth is that we don’t want to spend two hours in Hell, just so we can trash a movie that had very low expectations for itself in the first place.
There’s an old saying that “Nobody intentionally sets out to make a bad movie,” but I’m not so sure that that’s true. Director Rob Cohen has made both good and bad films, and some were highly successful—surely the best he could aim for with this script was high camp, no? Well, he almost made it because the film is a “Camp Classic” only with the “Classic” part.
J-Lo plays a teacher who’s separated from her husband and living with her teenaged son in a nice neighborhood. Ehen father and son go on a camping trip for the weekend, Lopez is conveniently all alone so that the hunky boy next door (oh, wow—so that’s where the title came from?) and she can share a night of naughtiness. He’s only twenty, but the minor has major moves.
Before they can even smoke a post-coital cigarette, teacher realizes that she has just done something terribly wrong. The kid, after all, is one of her students!! I didn’t mention that before because that is just one of a million “convenient” plot devices that make the movie so laughable.
This is the kind of film where the characters only do what the improbable storyline asks of them, and certainly not anything that would resemble actual human behavior.
The awkward giggles, and this is the absolute truth, came within the first thirty seconds of the film. January is notorious for bad releases, and now with both “Blackhat” and “The Boy Next Door,” we are off to a start that’s as dreadful as the dirty snow on the ground in the East.
Lopez is paid to act, sing and dance, and it just seems like it’s been a loooong time since she excelled at anything other being the persona known as “J-Lo.” She’s certainly a million miles away from the “Jenny From The Block” who came onto the scene with so much sizzle and promise.
A star was born, but now she’s just a Diva who makes B movies and shampoo commercials.
“The Boy Next Door” is rated “R” and runs 90 minutes. It gets 1 out of 4 Stars.