Second Act

It's got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you're watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle.

If only the world saw street smarts as equal to book smarts, Maya wishes on her birthday. It's a nice idea, but Second Act doesn't possess smarts in either category.

This is Jenny from the blah.

The film even has something to say, at least glancingly, about class prejudice in the real world, although in true Hollywood fashion the message is paradoxical.

She [Jennifer Lopez] tries gamely, but saddled with one of the worst scripts of the year, this definitely feels closer to her work in Maid in Manhattan than Out of Sight.

When the contrivances get too much in this 'Working Girl' for millennials, just watch take-charge, live-wire Jenny from the block deliver miles of smiles. Sometimes star power is its own reward.

This isn't a film that has set out to re-invent the wheel and yet works, by virtue of good screenwriting principles. I was taken by how few of these kinds of films we get these days, and how satisfying they can be when done right.

The movie is all over the place and there is no attempt to weave it into a coherent whole - which is regrettable as scene for scene it often works.

The film seems destined to survive all future nuclear winters, enduring as a time capsule of humanity at its most pitiably pedestrian.