“Jennifer Lopez shines through the mess of a technically shoddy and poorly written thriller.”
SPOILER FREE Not ‘The Girl Next Door’ as I referred to it once, being some bizarre spin-off about Mary Jane Watson finding herself as Spider-Man’s girlfriend in NYC. Although I would have much preferred that to what ‘The Boy Next Door’ had to offer which is few and far between. It’s grossed near ten times the $4 million dollar budget, but received a fairly negative reception both from critics and audiences – I wonder why? I think it’s easy to go into the screening of the film ready to hate it because of Jennifer Lopez on the front cover. Thankfully after careful analysis I’ve made up my mind that Jennifer Lopez isn’t actually the problem with the film. The film is the problem with the film.
Thrown instantly into some really dodgy editing depicting a marital separation, we’re presented to Claire (Jennifer Lopez), her son and ex-cheating husband who is still on the scene and a hunky next door neighbour. Despite the director (Rob Cohen) doing some rather popular work in the past such as ‘Dragonheart’, ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and ‘xXx’, I was thinking rather frequently of how the film managed to make its way to theatres. The quality was obviously rather amateur and seemed to fit a straight-to-DVD structure much better, but I guess Jennifer Lopez and the director’s previous work probably pulled most of the leeway.
After creepy, psycho next-door neighbour Noah (Ryan Guzman) seduces and has sex with Claire, he becomes noticeably more persistent at attracting her attention through harassment. As much as I think the film was rather badly directed with weak performances and stupid dialogue that could have been written by a schoolgirl; I really think Jennifer Lopez kept the film going! Her character was surprising appealing and interesting, and she was certainly believable. The film borders between thriller/horror without going one way or the other – in other words, the film has no idea exactly what it is trying to be. Different scenes are totally different genres and the film doesn’t have enough strong characters to keep us interested in everything that we’re meant to be paying attention to.
There’s no doubting that ‘The Boy Next Door’ is rather a mess, but having said that; I do commemorate Jennifer Lopez’s performance. It could have been completely hit or miss, and for a script that was badly written, she was the only thing that shined. The element of threat carried throughout; although completely unoriginal and something that many will have experienced before, was believable enough. All in all, it’s worth a miss – but if you ever stumble across it, take a look at Jennifer Lopez’s performance…Not bad.
★★
Hudson-Cook 