Monster-in-Law

I would rather have watched Leprechaun 5, twice, without any alcohol to dull my senses, alone on a Friday night than sit through two mind-numbing hours of this movie. It was absolutely horrific.

Under the fierce visual and aural assault, my mind briefly lost consciousness at one point, but I’m certain that I did not miss anything of relevance as this movie was predictable to a fault. I mean it practically writes itself.

Charlie (Jennifer Lopez) meets and falls in love with Kevin (Michael Vartan), a surgeon and pathetic weakling. We are subjected to at least half an hour of their budding courtship, where Kevin tells Charlie after spending about 10 minutes with her that her eye color is, “brown at first sight, amber upon closer inspection, a medium chestnut brown tipped with russet as you gaze softly upon the sunset, and a burnt sienna with a touch of raw umber when you realize how disgustingly weak and submissive I am under my mother’s stifling matriarchal regime.”

Aw, says Charlie, you’re so different from other men because you know that my eyes are brown.

I was mentally willing my heart to stop beating at this point, as I realized with utter terror that this was only the first half hour of the movie. It gets worse. Kevin takes Charlie to meet his domineering mother, Viola (Jane Fonda), who predictably hates Charlie as she is a lowly temp and therefore unworthy of her impotent son. Kevin decides that the proper thing to do at such a meeting is to propose to Charlie, reasoning that it is, “the perfect moment.” Viola becomes completely unhinged and sets out to destroy the relationship by driving Charlie nuts. She moves in with the couple and proceeds to irritate Charlie at every moment by acting like a complete loon.

Uh huh.

JLo is normally someone whom I enjoy watching, and yet her character in this movie is so irritating with the constant baby-talk pitch of her voice and inexplicable attraction to the emasculated Kevin, with whom she shares absolutely no chemistry. I actually found Jane Fonda’s performance to be pretty entertaining, but no amount of good acting could have saved this movie from being relentlessly boring, predictable and completely asinine. It was simply too difficult to find the situations funny, when they have absolutely no chance of ever happening to any person in real life. Throw in an assortment of repugnant dialogue and this movie becomes excruciatingly painful to watch.

My eyes and ears are still bleeding.