Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be unaware of the ability of the British to enjoy a film so bad it’s almost good. I suspect many Brits will shamefacedly delight in this so-called erotic thriller’s camp silliness, its truly dreadful script and its almost mockingly implausible premise. This is a film where a bespectacled Jenny from the Block plays a classics teacher (yes) who receives a pretty copy of Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem ‘The Iliad’ as a gift and quite sincerely exclaims, ‘Wow, is this a first edition?’
How can you follow a gem like that? The answer is with many more inadvertent jokes of a similar ilk, made all the funnier for their intended gravitas. This is a kind of gender-reversal Fatal Attraction, where J-Lo plays Claire, a sad, middle-aged woman on the brink of divorce who has a one-night stand with a hot young thing Noah (Ryan Guzman), only to discover that he is a complete psychopath intent on making her his missus and destroying her life until she relents.
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