ABOVE: Watch the trailer for The Boy Next Door.
TORONTO — The Boy Next Door is a low-budget thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as a recently-separated high school teacher whose life is turned upside down by 19-year-old neighbour Noah (Ryan Guzman), after a one-night stand.
Will audiences buy Lopez as a literature teacher and 27-year-old Guzman as a teenager? Here’s a look at what some of the critics are saying.
“The well-written thriller is a masterpiece of tension, brought to life by strong performances, a clever plot and … yeah, of course we’re joking,” wrote Liz Braun of QMI Agency. “It’s a crap movie.”
Braun complained The Boy Next Door “has all the plot holes, illogical developments, terrible dialogue and lousy acting that appear to be de rigueur in a Jennifer Lopez movie.”
Still, she said the movie is “fun to watch.”
Sheri Linden of The Hollywood Reporter said The Boy Next Door offers “some guilty-pleasure thrills and laughs” even though it falls “way short of its potential on both the dramatic and the camp fronts.”
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about other recent movies
She wrote: “The screenplay by prosecutor-turned-screenwriter Barbara Curry lays out some heavy-handed background to explain Noah’s derangements and fixations, but everything gives way to full-tilt lunacy, leading to an inevitable showdown complete with don’t-go-into-the-basement suspense, flat-out torture and implausible heroics.”
Washington Post reviewer Michael O’Sullivan also noted the movie’s many improbabilities.
“The Boy Next Door plays best as unintentional comedy. It’s a movie about a young man with an unhealthy mother fixation, but if you go into it expecting something closer to Mommie Dearest than Psycho, you’ll probably have a much better time.”
Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly was not a fan.
“A few deliciously bonkers bons mots dot the Lifetime-grade dialogue, and Lopez is game enough,” she opined. “But Boy‘s premise reeks of stalker-movie mothballs, and it’s too timid to fully dive into the high camp it hints at. Instead, this cookie just crumbles.”
Gregg Katzman of IGN said the movie will look familiar to most people.
“There are just so many tropes in here and you’ll be able to predict just about everything that happens,” he wrote.
“The plot telegraphs twists well in advance, never really defies expectations, and has characters making frustrating decisions from time to time. You’ll see the twists and drama coming a mile away. If a movie is focusing on tension and thrills, it needs some good surprises thrown in there and this movie doesn’t really have any.”
Katzman said the tone of the movie shifts near the end and feels out of place.
“Yes, everything is escalating, but things get surprisingly gory and it feels totally out of place,” he said. “Instead of being shocking, it just feels hilariously over-the-top.”
At Time, Daniel D’Addario opined The Boy Next Door looks “cheaply made and has a plot hinging on provocation and contrivance far more than good sense or good taste.”
Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian made a similar observation.
“It feels rushed, bland and cheap,” he said.
“Other than one crafty camera move that boasts a gloriously ridiculous ‘he’s hiding behind the potted plant’ reveal, there isn’t much of a visual stamp on the whole picture.”
Still, Hoffman decided the movie isn’t all that bad.
In the Miami Herald, Rene Rodriguez said all bad movies “should have the decency to be as entertaining as The Boy Next Door.”
Rodriguez called the movie “a boilerplate, preposterous thriller.”
He wrote: “The film is so gleefully ridiculous that you start to suspect the filmmakers were in on the joke and forgot to tell the actors.
“There isn’t anything here you haven’t seen a million times before,” he wrote.
“The Boy Next Door is a factory-line thriller, the sort of modestly budgeted, unchallenging picture Hollywood cranks out to feed the multiplex machine during the doldrums of January. But whatever charges you can level at the movie, and they are legion, boring isn’t one of them.”
Comments