'SECOND ACT'.......J-LO CAN YOU GO?

Second Act (2018)    Here's what we really, really would have preferred to sit through.......

              Not this movie, but the pitch meeting that spawned it.........

              We bet it was a hoot......along the lines of those Hollywood satires where a sweaty, fast-talking agent desperately spews out a hard sell for a screenplay cobbled together from multiple movies........."It's 'Pretty Woman meets 'Titanic' meets 'Steel Magnolias meets 'The Terminator"!

                The people behind this Jennifer Lopez vehicle literally threw spaghetti against the wall and tried to make it all stick together..........or to steal another metaphor, this movie was assembled the same way Victor Frankenstein sewed up his creature.......using parts stolen from other people......

                 Considering that there's at least three different movies floating around in this mess, let's examine 'em individually.......

                J-Lo the Retail Toiler........she's a blue collar, brilliantly successful sales manager for a huge upscale supermarket chain.......and unfairly denied a well-deserved promotion because of her lower-class hardscrabble background....(no college degreee). The job goes to an obnoxious imbecile with an MBA......

                All by itself, this would cover new ground for a rom-com.......with the entire cast made up of working class stiffs surviving from paycheck to paycheck.......as opposed to the usual Hollywood set-up where everyone's living in million buck McMansions.....

                 J-Lo invades corporate Valhalla based on a Big Fat Lie.......but now we move on to more typical boilerplate stuff.......in which our gal Jen, armed with a completely phony resume, scores an exec position at a top cosmetics company.  The Big Fat Lie is a fave Hollywood trope (readily adopted by most Hallmark movies)........How long can she keep up the charade?  Will her evil nemesis at the company expose her?  What if they ask her to do stuff on her resume....like speak Mandarin and captain a rowing crew?

                   Standard rom-com hijinks........and we did laugh at the rowing crew disaster, an accurate depiction of what might have happened if Lori Laughlin's daughters were forced to perform the skills they falsely claimed on their college applications.........

                  J-Lo reconnects with the long lost daughter she gave up for adoption.....This is clearly a whole other movie altogether, but incredibly, it's jammed into the other two........and the already too busy plot collides it with J-Lo's Big Fat Lie to her corporate overseer.....who adopted the daughter way back when......(we just developed a migraine describing this....)

                  And let's not forget the Rom part of the romcom........

                   J-Lo won't commit to her perfect loving boyfriend......poor Milo Ventimiglia gets stuck with most thankless role in  a J-Lo vehicle where three different storylines are competing with each other......(and the film offers hims no active role in any of them)......he's reduced to man-candy bookends, popping up at the start and the finish......

                   So what you've got here isn't much of a movie.......it's the aftermath of a lengthy pitch meeting in which every possible idea for 4 possible J-Lo movies was tossed into the pot.......

                  ............the result: a lumpy, indigestible stew. 1 star (*)