Monster-in-Law: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

In the broad new comedy, "Monster-in-Law," Jane Fonda emerges from her recent tobacco bath to take on her first movie role in 15 years. The good news? At 67, Fonda is still smoking.

Here, she is Viola Fields, an internationally famous, well-preserved talk show host who isn’t exactly on the fast track to sainthood.

Viola is what you might call a clawful. As difficult as she is accomplished, as deadly as she is disarming, she’s a lethal woman whose less than desirable traits — a mean right hook to the jaw, a willingness to poison if things don’t go her way, motherly greed, toxic love, jealousy, hypocrisy, name-dropping, rage—come to a head when she loses her television show to a young upstart hired for her perkiness and youth.

For Viola—and for the world, really—things only worsen when her only son, Kevin (Michael Vartan), a doctor with the personality of a shrub, gives his heart to the sunniest of multitaskers.

That would be Charlie Cantilini (Jennifer Lopez), a bright blast of struggling good cheer who does all sorts of things to hammer out a living.

For instance, mid-30s Charlie spends her days walking dogs along the beach in her pigtails and short shorts. Isn’t she sweet? She also temps as a secretary at a doctor’s office, serves shrimp balls at swank parties without a trace of irony, and dabbles in her own designer duds.

Somehow, she also has time to wax cute, which is enough for Kevin but not exactly enough for the movie. J.Lo, you see, is way out of her league here — she’s so banal, so safe, so out-classed by the rest of the cast, some might not even realize she’s in the movie until it’s half over.

That’s due in large part to Fonda’s ferocious, go-for-broke performance, which is set to full burn, and to Wanda Sykes’ biting turn as Viola’s corrosive assistant, Ruby, whose job it is to observe the mayhem through cutting asides. Obviously, these two came to have fun and to steal the show, which they do, neatly achieving a nuclear boil when Viola decides there’s no way in hell her son is going to marry Charlie.

As directed by Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde") from a script by Anya Kochoff, "Monster-in-Law" features a plot that’s as thin and as predictable as Lopez’s singing voice, and the story never is as dark or as mean as it should have been. Still, it does have its moments, particularly when Elaine Stritch shows up to level the landscape as Viola’s own evil monster-in-law, and it does fulfill its promise as a light comedy.

Anyone looking for something deeper might be disappointed.

Grade: B-