THE BOY NEXT DOOR
Director : Rob Cohen
Cast : Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Kristin Chenoweth, Ian Nelson
Genre : Thriller
Run Time : 91 mins
Opens : 22 January 2015
Rating : R21
January
is upon us again, and as much as we try to brace ourselves against it, we’ll never
be fully shielded from the deluge of dump month dreck. In this very January
thriller, Jennifer Lopez plays Claire Peterson, a high school literature
teacher whose marriage to her husband (Corbett) is on the rocks after he cheats
on her. Along comes Noah Sandborn (Guzman), the new dashing, young next-door
neighbour. Friendly, helpful and quick to befriend Claire’s bullied son Kevin
(Nelson), Claire is eventually seduced by Noah, culminating in a night of
passion. She realises her mistake, but Noah’s obsession with her escalates,
putting Claire, her family and friends in mortal danger.
The Boy Next Door comes from Blumhouse
Productions, a studio which has found great success with low-budget horror
flicks including the Paranormal Activity
franchise. It is puzzling just what demographic The Boy Next Door is going for. On the surface, there’s the Desperate Housewives-style angle of a
woman in her 40s falling for a dangerous boy toy but the film’s second half
packs in swearing, surprisingly gruesome violence and a dash of nudity (though
not from Lopez herself). The Boy Next
Door is at once a Lifetime Channel movie of the week and an early-90s
erotic thriller, taking the very worst elements of both, the end result wholly
lacking in any kind of real appeal. From the get-go, it’s hokey and
predictable, Barbara Curry’s screenplay packed with utterly cringe-worthy
lines. For example, as part of the set-up of how impossibly ideal a man Noah
is, he's not only handy but is also into classic literature and at one point says
“dude, you gotta read The Iliad”.
Jennifer
Lopez’s film career has generally not been regarded as a successful one,
despite her numerous credits. Unlike former flame Ben Affleck, she will likely
never be able to outrun the shadow of Gigli
and that shadow looms large in The Boy
Next Door. Jennifer Lopez as a literature teacher is about as believable as
when Mark Wahlberg played a science teacher in The Happening. Lopez is a co-producer and it seems the film
primarily exists so she can show off that famous figure of hers. We speculate
that her character being the object of a much younger man’s ravenous desire was
probably appealing to Lopez as well.
Ryan
Guzman, of Step Up: Revolution fame,
also gets to flaunt his body – his character is actually introduced by way of a
bicep entering the frame. Guzman is an example of what we call the
“Abercrombie-isation” of Hollywood’s male leads and his acting skills are
indeed sorely lacking. He’s a passable sexy bad boy but is plainly unconvincing
as a crazy, deadly stalker and all in all, comes off as one of the blandest
psychopaths to ever creep across the screen. Kristin Chenoweth is Claire’s stock
annoying friend and conveniently enough the vice principal at Claire’s school. Ian
Nelson is stiff as Claire’s son Kevin who looks up to Noah and sees him as
someone to emulate. One element that does have potential is how Noah
manipulates in order to get closer to his mother, though even that gets really
silly really fast.
It
would seem that director Rob Cohen’s career is spiralling downwards and even
when compared to his infamous bomb Stealth,
The Boy Next Door is several steps down
on the bad movie ladder. Judging by a “tense” sequence built around a runaway
Shelby Mustang that concludes in the most stunt show-y way possible, it appears
that Cohen dearly misses the Fast and the
Furious films, the first of which he directed. Instead, he has racked up so
many blemishes on his track record that he has to say yes to helming this pile of
unintentional hilarity instead.
Summary: A train-wreck in which unconvincing performances, bad
dialogue and half-baked thrills lie on the ground in a twisted mess, The Boy Next Door is a typical January
flick.
RATING: 1.5 out of 5
Stars
Jedd Jong
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