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Second Act review: Jennifer Lopez's crowd-pleasing office comedy just about works

Charlyne Yi, Alan Aisenberg, Jennifer Lopez, and Annaleigh Ashford in Second Act  - second act27469
Charlyne Yi, Alan Aisenberg, Jennifer Lopez, and Annaleigh Ashford in Second Act - second act27469

Dir: Peter Segal. Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Milo Ventimiglia, Vanessa Hudgens, Leah Remini, Annaleigh Ashford, Charlyne Yi, Treat Williams, Dalton Harrod, Freddie Stroma, John James Cronin. 12A cert, 104 mins

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives, but he never met Jennifer Lopez, whose screen career is a near-constant carousel of reinvention. Roughly every three years, she adds another film and a makeover, cautiously budgeted these days, and slotted into time-proven genres (2010’s motherhood romcom The Back-Up Plan; 2015’s femme-peril thriller The Boy Next Door) which ride a critic-proof path to commercial success.

Second Act is basically Working Girl, with J.Lo, at 49. Girding her loins for boardroom combat, she’s Maya Vargas, an assistant sales manager at a budget superstore, who starts out being ditched for promotion because she never graduated high school or got a degree, unlike the dweeby male candidate entirely lacking her managerial brio and people skills.

All is not lost, however: thanks to a fake CV, cooked up behind her back by a friend’s computer-nerd son, she turns up to interview at a big-time cosmetics firm and finds herself consulting for Treat Williams’s avuncular CEO in a much more senior role than she bargained for.

The kicker is that Maya knows her way around skin products – we know this, because no one has ever jogged around Queens in their movie’s opening credits wearing more. To eye-rolling and incipient scheming from the company’s upstart division heads, including a prim Vanessa Hudgens, she explains why their new line of “organic” avocado moisturiser hasn’t thrived, and is set the task of developing an all-new, 100% green alternative, with only a handful of socially awkward assistants to do her bidding.

Now if this were a Nancy Meyers movie, Maya would undoubtedly be juggling career with family and endlessly letting them all down with scheduling conflicts. Mercifully, no: while her live-in boyfriend (Milo Ventimiglia) is keen to start one, she’s given up that game. That said, the script weighs itself down with an insane mid-way dramatic swerve it could on every level have lived without, sketching in a sob-for-me backstory involving homelessness and teenage pregnancy that really works overtime to make us feel sorry for her.

Beyond one legitimately hilarious set-piece involving a Chinese vet, a few more laughs might have been welcome, but the impossibly risible coincidence we get sold is much too accidental a source.

There’s something wonky, too, about how blithely the script has been moulded to make Maya a victim of workplace sexism, ageism, and girl-on-girl rivalry who comes out swinging while barely having to do anything. The fraud that gets her in the door isn’t her idea, she gets in front of it with heaven-sent timing, and all the gawky nerds she’s stuck with turn out, through sheer fluke, to be secretly geniuses. As mid-life Cinderella stories go, this one has quite a support network backstage, as if the ugly sisters were on sweatshop duty stitching the gown together.

And yet, for all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability. It’s hard to resist any comedy which inspires J.Lo, at a Yuletide cocktail function, to ad lib a hostile tango with her workplace nemesis (a smirking Freddie Stroma), purely to prevent him blowing her cover. She ends up shoving him into a Christmas tree and getting the hell out – great tips here for any aspiring entrepreneur who just needs a dash more self-belief. The only mistake Maya makes is trying (slightly, barely) to hide her blue collar roots.

J.Lo’s most famous first act lyric gets a crowd-pleasing encore, and who’s complaining? She’s still Jenny from the block, just with a few more miles on the clock.

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