Review: Second Act

"I wish that we lived in a world where street smarts equalled book smarts," Maya laments in Second Act, the latest vehicle for Jennifer Lopez, who has established herself as her generation's Joan Crawford in terms of scrappy good-girls-gone-good movies. Essentially Working Girl meets variation on Stella Dallas, Second Act is buoyed by the considerable charms of Lopez, though undermined by a narrative that manages to be both slight and overly stuffed.

Maya is a middle-aged woman who has been striving for 15 years at a local supermarket store, whose sales have increased in the past 6 years due to her savvy initiatives. Unfortunately, though she knows the store and the community to which it caters better than anyone else, she's passed over for a managerial position because the position requires a college degree. It's a deep blow for Maya, who is also having to deal with her devoted boyfriend (Milo Ventimiglia) resurrecting his wishes to start a family with her. She's not too keen, especially since she's still feeling guilt from having a child at 17 and giving it up for adoption.

With the help of her wisecracking best friend Joan (Leah Remini) and her tech-savvy son Dilly (Dalton Harrod), Maya finds herself hired as a consultant for a cosmetics care company run by Anderson Clarke (Treat Williams), who is impressed by her remarkable resume. It's not difficult to see why since Dilly has created one where Maya is a Harvard graduate that served in the Peace Corps. Oh, and Dilly also designed a Facebook page that shows Maya rubbing elbows with the Obamas as well as scaling the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Lies may have gotten her a foot in the door, but Maya's knowledge of Clarke's products as well as sales and marketing gets her inside the inner corporate sanctum where she soon finds herself in direct competition with his daughter Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens), who also happens to be the company's vice president.

Maya's climb up the corporate ladder and the expected clash between her down-to-earth and common sense nature versus the data-driven corporate minions are entertaining enough, but the filmmakers decide to throw some melodrama in the mix. To reveal what this entails would be a huge spoiler, though it's fair to say that it's all so telegraphed that it's less a spoiler than an inevitability. On the face of it, this intertwining of two almost stand-alone plots shouldn't work and, in truth, there are many times when the film is thrown out of whack because of it, yet the entirety of Second Act works mostly due to its three leading ladies. Lopez and Remini successfully translate their off-screen friendship to the big screen; in fact, one wishes there more snappy exchanges between the two, especially since Remini's feisty Joan gets shunted to the sidelines in the film's second half.

Second Act is slight, serviceable and often narratively nonsensical, but one can't begrudge it. It's glossily packaged, soundly directed, and works well within its limits. It does the best it can, and sometimes that's all one can ask for.

Second Act

Directed by: Peter Segal

Written by: Justin Zackham, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas

Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Vanessa Hudgens, Leah Remini, Treat Williams, Milo Ventimiglia, Annaleigh Ashford, Charlyne Yi, Dave Foley, Larry Miller