The Boy Next Door

This is bad in the conventional sense where characters develop and we get insights, deliriously entertaining in the improbable trashy sense, as other J Lo thrillers have been. A smoldering boy moves in next door, he goes to the same school as J Lo's son where she's a teacher; a night of sex upsets balances.

The appeal is that we can have an assault on suburban normalcy, a titilating dismantling of normalcy; for example he fills a classroom with photocopies of their coupling and she has to scoop it up while pupils are about to come in any moment. Brakes on a car have been tampered with, he has kept a video, shenanigans just pile on and we watch in sardonic amusement as it gets more unhinged; it ends in one swoop with people getting shot and crushed by a winch.

On J Lo's end of things it's an opportunity for someone here to claim that the film empowers women and for us to arrive at the moral of the story, that mistakes happen and people deserve a second chance. I'll take the refreshing erotic thriller nonsense of this kind over juvenile Marvel races to save the world.