THE BOY NEXT DOOR – The Review

The unusually stupid THE BOY NEXT DOOR is a ‘bunnyboiler’, a FATAL ATTRACTION-inspired thriller that teaches a valuable lesson about the dangers of hooking up with nutjobs. Jennifer Lopez plays Claire Peterson, a 40-ish teacher living with her 16-year old son Kevin (Ian Nelson) after kicking out her cheating husband (John Corbett). Her foray back to the dating scene is a disaster so she soon turns her attentions to Noah (Ryan Guzman) a hunky 19-year old who has moved in with his ailing Grandpa next door (and whose biceps are introduced before he his). At first Noah is a perfect gentleman. He repairs her garage door, replaces her alternator, and helps Kevin, who’s being bullied at school, gain the confidence to ask out the cutie that works at the local hardware store. After pie and flirting and cookies, Claire and Noah finally knock boots one night while Kevin is away with dad. Claire immediately regrets the encounter but Noah won’t take no for an answer so spends the rest of the film upending Claire’s life in increasingly violent ways.

THE BOY NEXT DOOR starts out mediocre, spirals downward, and thuds with an utterly incompetent conclusion. It’s saddled with one of the more improbable and laughably absurd scripts to come down the pike in a long while, insulting the audience’s intelligence at every possible opportunity. Since she teaches English (“The Classics”), Noah charms her by quoting the Iliad and gifting her with a ‘first edition’ of the book (published in 700b.c – “found it for a buck at a garage sale”). Noah looks like a ripped Calvin Klein model with a nice house to himself (Grandpa’s in the hospital) so you’d think he’d have a revolving door of willing babes, but the script never presents a speck of motivation for his singular J-Lo booty fixation. A naked young blonde pops up in his room to administer a Lewinsky in one scene, but even that seems to be for the benefit of Claire, who continues to gaze out her window at him. My favorite is when Claire sneaks into Noah’s house to retrieve their sex tape that he stealthily filmed, knowing she has just five minutes before he returns. In that time she not only discovers his concealed camera, but a twisted shrine to her and his sinister computer files which expose his guilt in the killing of his parents and the attempted murder of her ex. Good work! Movies should be fun, and this one is in an unintended way, but the source of entertainment shouldn’t only come from identifying plot holes and other assorted implausibilities. This is an irredeemably bad movie.

A film as inept as THE BOY NEXT DOOR should at least have more camp value, but I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the scene in which Noah papers Claire’s classroom with (non-explicit) photos taken of the pair banging, which she frantically has to tear down before her students arrive. Nor was I moved by the barn-burning finale, in which the audience applauded when Claire jabs Noah in the eye with her son’s EpiPen (never seen that before!). Every plot twist and device is seen coming from a mile away, and every character is paper thin, including the supporting ones which are there simply to pose as obstacles or victims, especially poor Kristin Chenoweth as Claire’s sassy but doomed pal.

Director Rob Cohen (who made the equally terrible ALEX CROSS), from a script by Barbara Curry, seems determined to force this material into the moldy mold of horror formulas. For the movie to be anything more than a mechanical stalkathon, we need to experience Noah as an ambiguous figure —a kind of male equivalent of the Glenn Close character in FATAL ATTRACTION; a quasi-sympathetic monster whose dementia is really a twisted form of emotional pain. But we’re never allowed to see Claire through his eyes as this movie isn’t interested in much else besides paranoia and cheap thrills. With her perfect hair, designer clothes, and distracting lip gloss, Lopez is miscast as a suburban teacher/mom (though she does wear glasses while teaching “The Classics”, which helps). The 46-year old actress looks 30, while Guzman, a 27-year old actor playing the 19-year old title character, looks his age, therefore the single sex scene between them hardly looks like a cougar seducing a youngster but simply like two attractive people more or less the same age makin’ bacon.

The good news is that the pic’s running time of 92 minutes is mercifully brief, and it’s a fine showcase for J-Lo’s glamour and Ryan Guzman’s washboard abs. THE BOY NEXT DOOR is slickly paced but forgettable, junky, retread crap. Not recommended at all.

1 of 5 Stars