The Boy Next Door

If Rob Cohen’s The Boy Next Door proves anything, it’s that it takes a certain amount of intelligence and talent to make truly entertaining trash (or, at the very least, fascinating trash), two things Cohen, as a filmmaker, has long shown short supply of. Cohen is no Larry Cohen, no Lee Daniels, no Paul Verhoeven. No, Rob Cohen’s trash is one lacking in any sort of depth or self-awareness, one that’s too inept and too languid in its storytelling to be the tawdry thriller it strives for. I don’t want to come across as presupposing Cohen’s personal acumen as a human being, but he strikes me as a director who approaches filmmaking as a job, not as a craft. I suppose, under the right circumstances, with the right audience, there’s some unintentional mirth to be found here (that ability, I’m afraid, has long been sucked from me having reviewed so many bad movies), but by itself, The Boy Next Door is a incredibly thick-headed film that’s little more than gussied-up Lifetime Channel sleaze.

Here’s a film where — about a decade after the moviegoing public decided this was a bad idea — Jennifer Lopez’s Hollywood career has popped its head out of the ground. Lopez plays Claire, a high school lit teacher with a nebbishy son named Kevin (Ian Nelson, The Best of Me) and a cheating husband (John Corbett) she’s recently separated from. Everything’s fairly normal until Noah (Ryan Guzman, Step Up All In) moves in next door. Noah’s a hunky 20-year-old (played by a 27-year-old who looks 34) who, after an accident involving his parents, is still in high school and living with his uncle (Jack Wallace). So Noah befriends the awkward Kevin and starts hanging around the house, until he seduces Claire in a moment of weakness. Claire quickly regrets this, but not soon enough, as Noah’s violent, jealous and obsessive nature comes out and he begins to terrorize Claire and, eventually, her family.

This manifests itself in Noah plastering Claire’s classroom with stills from his secret sex tape he made of them, turning Kevin against his father and also cutting the brake lines to the man’s muscle car. There’s an escalation to Noah’s actions, but it never quite transcends into the sphere of truly creative trash. Sure, some moments — like Noah writhing around his bed with a copy of The Iliad in a fit of jealous rage — are amusing, but they’re solely due to their goofiness, not some greater plan. We get close to something more entertaining at the film’s climax, when Noah starts spilling blood and taking prisoners, but it’s too little, too late. Even the welcomely cheesy gore effects aren’t enough to make up for a movie that’s a tedious trudge (especially since one of these boneheads just calling the cops would solve so many problems) just to get to this point. Rated R for violence, sexual content/nudity and language.