The Boy Next Door

These days one can find busy singer/dancer/actress Jennifer Lopez performing her judging duties on the small screen with the longtime singing competition ‘American Idol’. However, the still radiant and curvaceous ‘JLo’ found some time to gravitate back to the big screen and revisit the overplayed ‘woman in peril’ genre with her latest generic psychological thriller in director Rob Cohen’s (‘The Fast And The Furious’) ‘The Boy Next Door’. Needlessly rehashed, rudimentary and titillating in tepidness, ‘The Boy Next Door’ is nothing more than a thin serving of the arbitrary ‘damsel-in-distress’ chick flicks that pop up and serve as throwaway conveyor belt melodramas. ‘The Boy Next Door’ will inevitably beg for obvious comparisons to ready-made Lifetime cable movies. Well, there are a decent amount of Lifetime movies that can actually give the limping ‘The Boy Next Door’ a run for its creative money.

In essence, Lopez is no stranger to these types of ‘harried heroines’ on the defense so she is quite comfortable in rollicking in the paper-thin premise of ‘The Boy Next Door’. In forgettable 2001’s ‘Angel Eyes’ and 2002’s ‘Enough’ we witness Lopez’s on-screen dilemma as the creepy men in her life are ominously drawn to her aura causing the heightened jeopardy at large. The case in ‘Boy’ is similar except that the delusional young man in question is as dreamy as he is deranged for the endangered cougar. Hey, he may be crazed but he is still cute, right ladies?

The reality is that we have seen this formula countless times before as ‘The Boy Next Door’ offers nothing fresh or feisty to the table. The teaspoon-sized tension is laughable. The run-of-the-mill steamy scenes are not even trashy enough to digest with notable suspense. Undoubtedly, ‘The Boy Next Door’ recklessly borrows from every psycho-thriller imaginable and still ends up looking bland and boorish. With all the loving-to-stalking fare out there past and present (ie ‘Fatal Attraction’, ‘The Crush’, ‘Fear’, ‘...