But there are many grades of terrible in Hollywood, and this is pretty nearly the worst. Is it signed by the author? This seems to be one of those cases where a celebrity performer has no trusted adviser forceful enough to tell her that a self-generated project was not working out quite as well as we had hoped, and that everyone involved needed to be bribed into silence and all cameras and files destroyed and shipped to landfills in Uzbekistan.
Lopez has always been a limited screen performer in the best of circumstances; she needs a savvy director, a strong male co-star and a well-defined script to appear to her best advantage. Compared to this atrocity, those forgettable but somewhat competent films are pretty much the collected works of Billy Wilder. What we have here is the unpleasant spectacle of a bad swimmer, for whom most of us feel a vague cultural affection, floundering in a bottomless pool full of sharks.
But director Rob Cohen and writer Barbara Curry utterly fail to create any sort of compelling artificial universe in which Claire and her problem β that being the hot year-old lunkhead next door, played by a year-old model and martial-arts fighter named Ryan Guzman β might make sense. Were they giving that away with the bodybuilding supplements at GNC or something?
But as this agonizing exercise dragged on I felt more and more sympathy for the douchey double-date guys, who at least own their small-mindedness. Again, to belabor the point: Not something someone who had actually read Homer would say! Of course none of that matters, and this would still be a terrible movie if Lopez had learned to read Greek for the role.
Well, here it is: Claire sleeps with Noah, naturally enough and I became momentarily engrossed in trying to figure out which shots were Lopez and which a body double. I guess the Homeric screw-up sticks in my craw because three minutes on Wikipedia could have cleared it up. That amply testifies that no one even pretended to give a crap, that all these supposed movie professionals signed up to work for Jennifer Lopez and cashed her checks and treated the whole thing as flushable and forgettable.
