Chekhov's EpiPen: The Boy Next Door Reviewed

By JOHN LOCANTHI

Critic's Grade: D

The Boy Next Door wastes no time. In its first few minutes, it half-assedly skims over the strained marriage of high-school teacher Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez). In the next few minutes, Claire is seduced by her 19-year-old neighbor, Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman), who's evidently come straight from the J. Crew spring catalog. This hunk promptly transforms into a violent, superhuman stalker in the vein of Cape Fear's Max Cady. By that point, we're a mere 20 minutes into the film, an unintentionally funny thriller that displays all the patience you'd expect from director Rob Cohen, the man behind xXx and The Fast and the Furious.

Claire is in a rut. Her marriage is in limbo. Her awkward teenage son has an unspecified condition—doctors are trying to figure it out—that requires him to carry around an EpiPen at all times. (Let's call it Chekhov's EpiPen.) To top it off, her BFF sets her up on a date with a boorish "schools should only teach job skills" lout. (Claire prefers the classics.) Enter Sandborn, who's moved in next door to help his ailing uncle. Claire watches through her window as he lovingly tucks his uncle in at night, teaches her son how to fix a car and stands naked in front of a mirror. Sandborn, a classics man himself, surprises Mrs. Peterson with a "first edition" of The Iliad that he found at a garage sale. The film undercuts this hacky seduction with ominous music, doubly underlining its point: Something about the boy next door ain't right.

So they bone. And then the movie that Cohen is actually interested in begins. Exhibiting behavior equal parts Oedipal, violent and psychotic—with an added Madonna-whore complex—Sandborn is suddenly everywhere. He’s hacking into Claire’s computer. He’s tampering with the brakes on her husband’s car. He’s in the hallway, fracturing her son’s bully’s skull. The film treats Guzman as a master manipulator, but the suggestibility of other characters often strains credulity—as does every character’s abject refusal to contact the police while all this is going on.


Some of the groan-worthy double entendres—“I love your mom’s cookies,” for example—suggest the film realizes its own ridiculousness. (And that’s not to mention that first edition of that ancient poem.) But with such dull acting, it can’t fully embrace camp and become an awesomely bad movie. Instead, it’s just a bad movie.

WWeek 2015

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