The Boy Next Door review: J-Lo's eye for an appalling script remains faultless

The world is once more in balance. After a period making so-so romantic comedies and giving birth to little Lopezes, J-Lo is back in the sort of breathtakingly abysmal thriller that, a decade ago, sullied a promising dramatic career.

Lopez plays an English teacher who, following separation from her philandering husband, makes friends with the new hunk next door (Ryan Guzman). They shake hands. He makes some supposedly clever (actually staggeringly moronic) remarks about literature: “Homer is a genius, like Shakespeare or Byron. Or Zeppelin or Dylan.”

Before too long, this supposedly cultured woman is peering at his biceps like the protagonist of a Diet Coke commercial. A little later, she’s clutching those biceps nakedly while – I’m guessing, I had my hands over my ears – sleazy saxophones parp in time with the sensual thrusting.

This being a film paced with all the subtle nuance of a car bomb, Noah, without offering so much as a subtextual hint, almost immediately reveals himself to be psychopath of intergalactic proportions. He turns Mrs J-Lo’s son against his father. He threatens to unleash photographs. Heck, if this were a bad film from the 1930s, he’d be tampering with the brakes on Mr J-Lo’s car. Oh no. They’re on a precipitous hill. He’s ramming the pedal. Nothing’s happening.

Are you kidding me?

It is unfair to take shots at such a soft target. Lopez is not a bad actress and she has rare old-school movie-star charisma. But her eye for an appalling script is faultless. Still, we shouldn't complain. No, supposedly empowering, gender- reversed take on Fatal Attraction has been quite so unintentionally amusing since 2002's Enough. Who was in that again?