If Fonda is partly suited to her role, Jennifer Lopez is not at all suited to hers.
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05/13/05
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Monster-in-Law (2005)
16
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Reviews Counted:161
Fresh:25
Rotten:136
Average Rating:4.2/10
Consensus: While Jane Fonda steals the movie in her return to the screen, a tired script and flimsy performances make this borderline comedy fall flat.
Theatrical Release:2005
Box Office: $82,820,167
Synopsis: Charlie (Jennifer Lopez) is looking for a nice guy who will appreciate her, as well as her myriad of interests and jobs. From walking dogs to painting to designing clothes to answering phones at a... [More]
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes
Director: Robert Luketic
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Reviews for Monster-in-Law
Fonda dives headlong into the comic mayhem of her role, and yet maintains the style and grace and gravitas of a major Hollywood diva.
05/13/05
Like Knott's Landing gone Defcon Five, with Fonda and Lopez in a Mega-Diva Catfight that involves such estro-centric issues as dress sizes and china patterns.
05/13/05
Back to screenwriting school for somebody.
05/13/05
Monster-in-Law isn't a particularly good movie if what interests you is the art of film -- cinematography, editing, screenwriting, staging, little things like that.
05/13/05
Jane Fonda came back from the dead, and Jennifer Lopez came back from Gigli to make the new comedy Monster-in-Law.
05/13/05
Poor Jennifer Lopez. Despite star billing, she is but a spectator at Fonda's fireworks show.
05/13/05
Top CriticIt's a one-joke movie, but we keep laughing because of the way the stars keep telling the joke.
05/13/05
It's a perfect comeback vehicle for a 67-year-old actress -- light, safe, undemanding and sure-to-be commercial. It is also a fairly tedious, stupid picture, but you can't have everything.
05/13/05
It lacks the meanness and vulgarity of much modern comedy (good) but fails to replace it with any meaningful insight or satire.
05/13/05
Without movie stars in the lead roles, these characters would be insufferably dull (in other words, they'd all be as vanilla as Vartan), and director Robert Luketic knows it.
05/13/05
Granted, Monster-in-Law is meant to be a laugh-fest, but it stoops very low and is too unkind to its actors in its pursuit of laughs.
05/13/05
Monster-In-Law has a stupid script, sure, but you'd think somebody would have had the courtesy to tell Lopez the picture was a comedy.
05/13/05
The phrase 'chewing the scenery' never made much sense to me (is this a phrase used in normal human conversation? Ever?), but I know it when I see it. And Jane Fonda gnaws it to the bone in Monster-in-Law.
05/13/05
Turns out Jane has come back to make a 95-minute mother-in-law joke. Scratch that, now I'm exaggerating. A joke is funny. A joke has rhythm and structure and timing and a punch line. This, by all evidence, is no joke.
05/13/05
Fluff has it's place, and it's awfully good to see feel-the-burn Jane back in action, unrepentant and laughing at herself and the world.
05/13/05
Lopez is no help with a performance that is so cutesy, so one-note, that she could have phoned it in.
05/13/05
Had the script paid more attention to its characters' emotional details, this Monster could have been a ball.
05/13/05
If there is any reason to watch Monster-in-Law -- a chore best reserved for a day when the flu has rendered you incapable of the ability to discriminate between good and bad -- it is to see Fonda acting again after all these years.
05/13/05
Monster-in-Law, is only saved -- by the skin of its teeth -- by co-stars, Jane Fonda and Wanda Sykes.
05/13/05
Top CriticLatest News for Monster-in-Law
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