Trust Your Plot

Well, here's a movie I never thought I would be reviewing.  But it was New Year's Eve and I wanted to keep things simple and quiet.   A trip to the iPic in Westwood and then a quick meal at their embedded restaurant.  Of the movies playing there, this was the only likely suspect.   So, yes, I concluded 2018 by seeing a Jennifer Lopez movie.  

Oh, the shame.

That said, the first half-hour of this poor man's version of "Working Girl" had me engrossed.  JLo is a high school graduate living in Queens with her boyfriend who is the baseball coach at Fordham.  (Scenes shot at my alma mater...yay!)   She works as a manager in some food emporium and is getting nowhere in her career.  Plus Boyfriend wants to settle down and have kids with her.   Not her cup of tea.   She already got pregnant at 16 and gave up the kid for adoption.  As soon as I heard this plot point, I knew it would come back in place.  Oh, boy, did it?

But I'm still a little interested.   When her friend's son sets up some fraudulent information on her background via social media, she winds up getting a huge gig at a major cosmetic company in Manhattan.  Okay, totally unlikely that her resume wouldn't have been vetted more thoroughly, but I allow for the creative license.  And I'm enjoying some of the corporate humor.

Almost immediately at the job, JLo winds up in a competition against a millennial executive who is the daughter of the company head.  Okay, that has possibilities.

And then the script adds an additional layer of intrigue that is totally unnecessary but completely takes the rest of the movie in a completely unwelcome direction.  You see the young millennial is also...well, I kind of prefaced it above.   Duh.  

The result of this "plot twist" is a very uneven movie that lost my interest almost immediately.  I would assume this was done by original design, but I wonder if the screenwriter looked at the first forty pages and thought "hey, this needs more."  Trust me.  It didn't.   You had me semi-engrossed.   When the alleged "unexpected turn" took over, I put the comfy iPic seat into recline mode and was happy to have a nice nap take over.   Unfortunately, it didn't and I was sadly wide awake through the rest of this.

Don't get me wrong.   I knew what I was getting when I walked in.  This was supposed to be a messy hamburger, not a succulent beef tenderloin.  But, still, they lost me in a way that I didn't expect.  By the end of the movie, I was still waiting for the messy hamburger.   Instead, they gave me nothing but a Slim Jim.

The post-movie meal was tasty, though.

LEN'S RATING:  One-and-a-half stars.

Dinner last night:   Grilled steak salad.