J-Lo sinks to a new low
Second Act (M, 104mins) Directed by Peter Segal Reviewed by James Croot ★★
With 15 years shopfloor experience at Value Shop, including five as assistant manager, Maya (Jennifer Lopez) is convinced this promotion will be hers.
So when she’s passed over in favour of a man with an MBA she is devastated. That this happens on her birthday also casts a pall over the surprise celebrations her partner Trey (Milo Ventimiglia) has planned.
Desperate to cheer up his favourite godmother, teenage computer whiz Dilly (Dalton Harrod) hatches a plan. Embellishing her CV and whipping up some doctored social media pages, Dilly puts Maya out in the market for a new role.
That means Maya is perplexed when she is asked in for an interview as a consultant for cosmetics and beauty company Franklin & Clarke. To her even greater astonishment, she impresses founding partner Anderson Clarke (Treat Williams) enough to land the role.
However, it isn’t long before Maya is feeling like she’s in over her head. Having given the feedback that their organic line isn’t really ‘‘organic’’ enough, she has to find an economically viable solution. If that wasn’t bad enough, her idea will go head-to-head with a crack in-house team led by Clarke’s daughter Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens).
Peter Segal’s (50 First Dates, Anger Management) dramedy is a movie filled with mixed messages, ridiculous contrivances and a crazily uneven tone.
Justin Zackham (The Bucket List) and Elaine Goldsmith Thomas’ script starts off as a romantic comedy, settles into a I Feel Pretty-esque workplace farce, before morphing into a festive family drama.
It also comes across as being crazily behind the times. Maya appears to come up against clear sexism or even racism in her workplace and yet ‘‘the fight’’ here is all about ‘‘street smarts’’ versus ‘‘book smarts’’. Jenny-from-the-block versus tertiary education.
Likewise, some of the supporting characters are clearly ghosts of Hollywood comedies past. There’s the oily British rival (Freddie Stroma) out to undermine her and a plain-speaking, sassy best friend (Leah Remini) to lift her spirits. Even the comedic set pieces (an attempt to woo foreign investors, a product launch that goes horribly wrong) feel like straight lifts from other, better movies and then there’s the big ‘‘twist’’.
Not only is it badly telegraphed, but it’s so clunkily handled and ill thought-out it almost completely derails any enjoyment of the movie (which will already be predicated on how much slapschtick humour and lines like ‘‘cockswain, my ass’’ you can stand).
And there are precious few delights here, most of them coming from Charlyne Yi (The Disaster Artist) and Annaleigh Ashford (Masters of Sex) who play Maya’s new assistants.
As for J-Lo herself, she tries gamely but, saddled with one of the worst scripts of the year, this definitely feels closer to her work in Maid in Manhattan than Out of Sight.