JLo’s Musical Movie Is An Unhinged Masterpiece
Before you dive into this review, I recommend pouring yourself a stiff drink and taking one massive inhale. What you’re about to read may make little to no sense, but I promise you I have done the most basic of reporting possible and am just describing what I saw on the screen in front of me.
I promise.
This Is Me… Now: A review.
The movie opens with a fairytale book, and JLo is narrating an ancient Spanish myth about true love, red flowers and a hummingbird. Things then quickly flash to Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck on a motorbike riding over an ice lake at 100mph. She’s smiling, he’s looking stubbly, and then BOOM. They crash.
Rather than focussing on the fallout of a high speed car crash, we are instead whipped on over to a large mechanical heart pulsing and breaking apart as a Matthew McCoughnahey impersonator at a news desk tells us the world doesn’t know how to feel anymore.
JLo, who is now some kind of factory worker in a (I hope) fictional world, is eating her lunch in the cafeteria as alarm bells are ringing. She’s in charge of fixing the mechanical heart before it blows, which would be an easier task to manage if her colleagues hadn’t formed a flash mob. Instead of grabbing wrenches they’re twerking everywhere.
But don’t worry because JLo drops a line that shows she’s qualified for this task. “I’m built for the mines,” she declares.
I’m not sure if you know Jennifer personally, but I can confirm she was built for the stage and not for the mines.
But before I can investigate her mechanical skills any further, JLo ‘wakes up’ from her dream and is in therapy with Fat Joe. He’s questioning what’s going on in her head (aren’t we all?) and says she’s too into star signs (not possible).
Jennifer then wakes up in her glass apartment block where she’s having a chit chat with her boyfriend who seems like a bit of an arsehole and smashes one of the windows next to her head. JLo responds by singing her song ‘Rebound’ while she dances with her dodgy boyfriend and some ropes. It sits somewhere between Shibari and when you put a toddler on a leash so they don’t run away.
The scene (episode/song/fever dream) ends with a quick zoom out and turns to a hole in the milky way where Jane Fonda, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Jay Shetty, Trevor Noah and Sofia Vergara are having a celestial meeting. They are the literal stars and they are trying to control the fate of JLo as she waddles through life. Their debate is cut short, though, as they realise Jennifer isn’t listening to them and instead is busy on a cliff-edge getting proposed to.
Cue the wedding sequence!
In a husband-mash-up first, Jennifer Lopez marries three men at the same wedding in a montage smoosh. One of them happens to be Derek Hough because this is a dance heavy scene. It’s visually stunning and there are approximately $3 million worth of flowers.
But just in case you didn’t have whiplash already, we flip from the cutting of the cake back to the therapy room with Fat Joe – this time, though, the husbands are present. They are talking about how they feel like an employee of JLo’s rather than her partner and rather than addressing the issues at play, Jennifer says, “Being with you feels like home… But I left home for a reason.” She walks outta therapy and right out of all of their lives.
We’re back to the celestial roundtable. The celebrity zodiac signs are stressed out that JLo isn’t finding the right dudes to date right as Jennifer stumbles home drunk with another idiot. (An idiot, I should note that looks an awful lot like JLo’s ex-fiancé, Casper Smart.) Her friends confront her at home and accuse her of being a “sex addict” which feels like a bit of a stretch, but don’t worry because JLo has a monologue prepared.
“I have a problem? What is wrong with wanting to spend your life with someone? Why does everybody act like that is so crazy?! Just to want to grow old together.”
Before we can see her friends giving her a round of applause, Jenny is back for another therapy session with Fat Joe. She tells him she still believes in magic and soulmates and that “love never dies”. He writes her a script for ‘Love Addicts Anonymous’ and she heads home to watch a rom-com, which feels like a relapse but I’m not ballsy enough to tell JLo that.
Off she pops to ‘Love Addicts Anonymous’ for her first session. She tells the group that she hasn’t been sleeping well, in fact, she never has because she has a “restless heart” – and no, not in a murmur way, but in a “I’m too romantic to function” way. She references having her heart broken once, and we get a flash to that motorbike scene, and IS THAT A DIG AT BENNY?
Ooop she’s singing, “I loved you so much, and that messed me up. You drifted away… tears on my gown… look what you’ve done”. Yep, it’s very much a dig at Ben who she calls “broken like me”.
We cut to her sitting in a ballgown by a roaring fire, where she’s chucking love letters straight into the flames. She says that she’s given up on love and I must say, heartbreak looks ridiculously good on this woman. The smize alone should be an oil painting.
Excuse me, it’s time for some personal growth. JLo has been invited to the most triggering of all events for a love addict: a wedding. Her friend is getting married in what I can only describe as the set of Mad Max. There is sand, large metallic alien bugs and, of course, another flash mob.
She explains to Fat Joe (once we’re back in therapy together for the umpteenth time) that she actually enjoyed going to the wedding alone. She feels comfortable in herself and I think she’s off to enter her independent woman era. But she tells Doctor Fat Joe on exit that she’s still never, ever giving up on love. That’s my girl.
Jennifer heads out to the streets, saying she’s going to catch the bus. This woman hasn’t been on public transport for at least three decades, but she’s got a cute raincoat and matching bucket hat so who am I to stop her on her humble commute?
As she’s waiting at the bus stop, a bird flies into her face. Not just any bird, but a hummingbird. Time for ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaahhhs’ people because I think we’re about to see an actual story arc at play here. She smiles at the hummingbird and immediately breaks out into song. She’s categorically Singin’ in the Rain and she’s going to catch a cold.
While she’s chirping on about loving love, she shows a flashback (or forward, who the heck knows at this point?) to the Mad Max wedding where she steps forward towards the chin of a man. A chin I know I’ve seen before. A familiar chin. Some may even say… a famous chin.
(It’s Ben Affleck’s chin, obviously.)
Okay so it IS a love letter to both herself and her ex-fiancé-now-current-husband Ben Affleck. An ode to Bennifer 2.0, if you will.
That could have been a satisfying ending, but I was trapped between movie genres, musicals, music videos and Marvel movies, so I was anticipating an “I don’t need a man” grand finale – you know the kind, where the happy ending is the leading lady finding herself.
But it never came.
The credits begin to roll as the rogue newsreader returns to the screen, chatting about love again. It’s only in this moment that I realise the McConaughey news reader is Ben Affleck with truly awful prosthetics on. I am so confused. He has the closing statement and while it ends on a cute note of “never letting love die” he goes off on a bit of a tangent nattering about a diabetic honey badger and that is somehow the most fitting way to end this fever dream.
Ben Affleck and his silicone nose fade out and thank god because I need a moment to process my thoughts. This was absolute insanity and I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a wonderful thing or not.
So much production has been wedged into this film that it was visually on par with the likes of Dune or a Marvel movie, which was stunning for my eyeballs, but because the plot was such a clusterfuck I almost couldn’t take in the graphics properly. I was so focussed on trying to figure out if the scene was a dream or reality or a musical number or an accident that I missed the chance to appreciate the detail in the faux dance factory, or the spectacle that was three back-to-back weddings.
And my Lord was the massive ensemble cast a distraction. Jane Fonda and the gang just popping up willy-nilly and taking me out of the story was delightful but added to the mayhem.
Okay, how about the music? It was classic JLo goodness. Dance energy, big belty moments but with the added surprise of some excellent X-rated lyrics. I’ve always thought that Jenny should lean a little further into the sex of it all and boy does she tick that off with this album. Keep an ear out for corkers like “climb on top of me and slip inside” to get you extra excited during This Is Me… Now.
Finally I simply have to talk about the plot. If you’ve made it to this point in the article, firstly, congratulations, and secondly, if you thought I’d gone bananas writing this review then I totally understand. But I have mapped this movie out scene by scene and attempted to explain what I was witnessing, but it really was that scatty. Scenarios shifted at breakneck speed, there was not ample signposting about whether a scene was in fact a dream sequence within a therapy session or not and it’s still not entirely clear whether Jennifer was playing a fictionalised version of herself.
The only structure I could spot was that the film followed the flow of the album This Is Me.. Now. But unlike visual albums like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, JLo’s creation has a lot more movie-ish features and has speaking-only scenes that are entirely detached from any songs. So there’s a thread of music, but because the story is a little random alongside, it’s unclear who she’s singing about at any point. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this done purely with pop songs too, so when there’s a moving or emotional scene in the film it appears a tad jarring for her to break out into a bop.
I know the above sounds like a bit of a slag-off to the movie, but I honestly adored this mayhem. I definitely resonate with Jennifer feeling like the world looks down at the romantics (because they do and it’s really fckn annoying) and I think it’s admirable that she’s essentially made a movie about never giving up on the dream of falling in love and growing old with someone amazing. It does feel like a humongous and very expensive love letter to herself, and if you’re JLo why the fuck would you not write that.
It also feels like she and Ben got plastered one night and smushed their music and movie brains together and had this conversation:
Ben: “You should make a feature film to promote your new album. You’re such a good actor, baby.”
Jen: “You’re right. I should! And I’ll rope in my famous friends to make the most jacked ensemble ever seen on screen.”
Ben: “That’s a great idea! Can I be in it too?”
Jen: “Sure. But only if you cosplay as Matthew McConaughey.”
Ben: “Okay…”
Regardless of the mayhem, it’s clear that Jennifer Lopez knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s made an album, turned it into a movie, promoted the heck out of it, sold it to Prime Video, and is laughing all the way to the bank. She backs herself to an astonishing degree, and she’s not hiding her tactics at all. In fact, the last song to play while the credits are rolling has the lyrics:
“Getting rich off love to the bank we running.”
Yes you are JLo. And you can count on me to give you my money if you continue to produce insane masterpieces that excite and confuse me to this degree.
Image Credit: Prime Video