The only believable plot point of “The Boy Next Door” is that a vulnerable suburban mother going through divorce could be seduced by her ripped young neighbor in a moment of weakness. The lead up to that plays like a melodramatic, annoying daytime soap opera. The beefcake’s immediate, insane obsession that follows is rooted in abusive relationship dynamics but mostly feels like absolutely ridiculous schlock. However, it’s so over-the-top preposterous that it does provide a little bit of silly fun.
Jennifer Lopez is sultry as high school classic literature teacher Claire Peterson, separated from her cheating husband (John Corbett) and caring for her effeminate teenage son Kevin (Ian Nelson). When the muscular and charming 19-year-old Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman, who’s in his mid-20s and clearly looks it) moves in with his elderly uncle next door, he helps Kevin with manly stuff and discusses “The Iliad” with Claire, and in turn she develops a crush on him.
Hesitant to accept her husband’s attempts to get back together, she makes the mistake of giving in to Noah’s sexual advances one lonely, wine-filled night and a steamy sex scene ensues. She regrets it the next morning and dashes Noah’s dreams of it turning into more, so beginning his unsubtle unveiling as a psychopathic, manipulative, violent stalker who terrorizes Claire to no end as he tries to force her to be with him.
This kid is savagely crazy. He starts out simply unnerving Claire with threats to reveal their secret and making sexual innuendos in front of her husband and son, but he quickly ramps up his intensity. Before long he covers her entire classroom in photos of them having sex from the video he secretly recorded. Then he gets really dangerous, taking extreme, forced actions to move the story to an outlandish climax.
First-time writer Barbara Curry’s script, filled with sneer-worthy clichés, radical behavior and two-dimensional characters, requires such a high level of suspension of disbelief that the only thing grounding it in a semblance of believability are similarities to real abusive relationships: the exertion of control, the raging anger, the victim being trapped in the situation. Those are then extrapolated to the degree of an ‘80s horror B-movie dressed in modern cheap clothing.
J-Lo endears with her strength, charisma and beauty enough to keep viewers going along through her struggle, while Guzman tips into childish tantrums and immature entitlement too often for his malicious intent to feel more threatening than bratty. Director Rob Cohen stitches together some demented and outrageous elements to make “The Boy Next Door” at least watchable, if ludicrous, once the obsession kicks in, but never worthwhile.
0 comments:
Post a Comment