TwitReview – Jennifer Lopez stars in The Boy Next Door a movie that has 99 problems and the story is just one!
Grade: 0 stars and I’m nominating it for a 2015 Razzy!

Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez) is separated from her husband Garrett (John Corbett) and has custody of their son Kevin (Ian Nelson). Claire meets their neighbor’s (Jack Wallace) grandson Noah (Ryan Guzman) when he helps with a stuck garage door. Flirtation leads to sex which leads to anger from Noah as he feels that Claire is pushing him away after their one time together. Noah’s anger leads to hate leading to suffering with a very cartoony ending that leaves you the audience laughing more then you should in what is supposed to be a thriller.

What works:

• For my wife it was the actor that played Noah. She thought that Ryan Guzman was the perfect blend of Channing Tatum mixed with Taylor Kinney.

What doesn’t work:

• The opening sequence was a jumble of a mess as we got very short and quick clips (with bad dubbing) of Garrett begging Claire to take him back after he had cheated on her. Adding to this was that their son Kevin just didn’t understand why mom and dad were fighting. All while showing Claire on her daily run because this is the only thing she must think about when out running considering that it has been eight months since the two of them separated.
• Claire and Kevin meet Noah when he sees that their garage door is having problems and Claire just isn’t strong enough to lift it on her own. He offers to help and slowly becomes a good friend to Kevin. On top of this he is in town for a while taking care of his elderly grandfather (Jack Wallace) who happens to be the next door neighbor. He is there to take care of the house as his grandfather will be in the hospital for an extended stay getting a bone marrow transplant. The oddity of this is that later on in the last act, the grandfather just mysteriously appears and startles Claire as she is leaving his house. Mind you she was there looking for information on Noah (we’ll get to that shortly) and he just showed up out of nowhere like a cat that jumps out of the shadows in horror films.
• Lopez and Guzman have zero chemistry at all when on screen together. Their characters flirt with each other for the first 25 minutes of the movie and Jennifer Lopez just seems like she’d rather be at an American Idol audition then on the set of this movie. No golden ticket for her, that’s for sure. And I won’t even go into description of the 30 minute mark when the soft-core porn happens between Claire and Noah.
• Claire’s friend Victoria (Kristin Chenoweth) is the Vice Principal of the school where they both work. The character is that woman that is in her 50’s and still thinks she is in her 20’s, wants to dress “hot” and act like the cool chick. I will say that Noah had it right when he calls her out for this. The issue here is that Kristin Chenoweth looks like she has a plastic face and had a static facial expression every time on screen.
• Noah’s acts of revenge just felt “by the number” in that he attacked Claire trying to scare her into being with him. Noah breaks into Claire’s room at school and plasters the room with photos of the two of them from the night they slept together. This of course has Claire all flustered and she knows that Noah must be stopped. This also leads to a very poorly paced sequence where Claire’s students are locked out of the room as she races around cleaning up all the photos just as the Principal (Hill Harper) is slowly unlocking the door. Funny how she had everything gathered up and hidden under her desk just as the door was opening up to let the students in.
• Remember the garage I mentioned earlier. It’s gone. No longer on the property of the house. The movie is so bad that the garage left and was replaced by a fence and bushes. Claire no longer parks her car in the garage. Is she afraid that the door will now fall on her? I mean, where is the continuity person. How did the garage go missing? Quick, call out Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive and U.S. Marshalls. 
• Claire finds out that Noah has a video of the two of them and that the file is saved on his computer. She breaks into her neighbor’s house and locates the camera as well as tracing the cable from the receiver that the camera was using back to the basement where Noah’s Macbook Air was located. After opening the computer (no password Noah, you should know better) she finds the video and the pictures and deletes them. I mean what are the odds that he doesn’t have a backup of these files?? Then again he didn’t have a password on the computer so anything is possible. Claire also finds files on the 2009 Charger that Garrett has and a 2006 minivan that his parents owned. She see that the files contain images regarding the break lines. Instead of taking the computer with her or calling the police, she runs home.
• Meanwhile the only reason Claire was able to break into the house was because Victoria had tricked Noah into following her after leaving school. Victoria had Claire’s car and once Noah caught on to the deception he floored it to Victoria’s house so he could attack her when she got home. This leads to Noah calling Kevin and tricking him to bring Garrett to the farm so they can eventually get captured. Claire races to Victoria’s place where the front door is unlocked and opened and the lights are off and not working. So instead of calling the police, she walks in and uses her cell phone’s flashlight to explore the house. I mean why use the phone to actually call the police because your friend is missing and could be dead when the flashlight is easier to use?
• Noah captures Claire bringing her to the barn where he has Kevin and Garrett strung up. Garrett gets shot during the scuffle that Noah and Claire have as she tries to save her family. At this point you have to wonder what could happen next? Noah tries to burn the barn down around everyone and Claire manages to stab Noah in the eye with Kevin’s EpiPen. Noah then starts to Yosemite Sam-it by shooting wildly around the burning barn before chasing after Claire. As I’m watching this the only thing I can think of is that an anvil was needed to fall from the sky and land on Noah like the cartoon this was turning into. BOY WAS I RIGHT as Claire drops an engine that had been hanging from the rafters on top of Noah. How’s that for premonition on my part!

Final thoughts:

Rated R for language, sexual acts, and violence. The run time of 97 minutes feels a lot longer then it actually is.  The Boy Next Door is one of those movies that you can just skip and not feel bad for missing it at all.