With thirty-two film credits to her name, starting with her first role in 1986’s My Little Girl, Jennifer Lopez is more “movie star” than singer when one gets technical about it. After all, thirty-two movies to eight albums would seem to suggest where Lopez’s passions lie. She even told her grandparents after acting in 1986’s My Little Girl that it was her dream to be a famous film star–only to have them kibosh it with the reminder that Latinos did not (and often still do not) become movie stars. So naturally Lopez moved into her own ramshackle in Manhattan to pursue what she was told would be impossible.
With this background in mind, Lopez is tailor-made for the part of Maya Vargas, a lowly employee at the Value Shop in Ozone Park, Queens (will the Bronx feel betrayed that she’s pretending to pose as a Queensian?) trying to at least somewhat fulfill her potential by going out on a limb for the manager position there. Based on her innovation stemmed from natural street smarts (a.k.a. having empathy for the common man), Maya has upped sales noticeably more than any other branch of the store, making her a shoo-in for the promotion–or so her live-in boyfriend of five years, Trey (Milo Ventimiglia), would have her believe with his plucky attitude about how practical experience is more valuable than a bougie education.
Apparently, not so. Which is exactly what Maya predicted, though this doesn’t stop her from being disappointed when a white guy named Arthur (Dan Bucatinsky) who went to Duke is given the position by the company’s head honcho, Weiskopf (Larry Miller, a former Garry Marshall staple). Just as she suspected, “fancy” usurps “rough-hewn.” Her best friend, Joan (Lea Remini), who also works at the store with her and helped her to found Monday Momz, a place in the store for single mothers like Big Ant (Dierdre Friel) and Suzi (Lacretta) to commiserate over solo parenting/hating their exes, urges her to make a birthday wish that night regardless of the disappointment. Because disappointments always seem to happen on one’s birthday if Sixteen Candles taught us anything. She feels resigned, however, remarking in the same fashion as Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman, “The world tells you who you are enough times, maybe it’s time to believe it.” In Vivian’s terms, it was, “People put you down enough, you start to believe it.” And most assuredly there are several similarities between Second Act and Pretty Woman as far as the Cinderella story narrative goes. For one thing, it requires clothes and the overall aura of wealth for anyone outside of Queens to take you seriously (though this will change once the Amazon infiltration into the borough is complete).
But what Second Act most closely resembles (when you take away the curveball adoption subplot) is another beloved J. Lo vehicle: Maid in Manhattan. For in that same Shakespearean concealment of identity way, Maya must hide who she truly is, let people become enchanted with “a version” of herself (as Trey later calls it) in order to succeed at her aim. One she soon finds involves coming up with a 100% organic skin care line that can be made within the budget and up the profit margins. It almost sounds like a challenge for Elle Woods. To intensify matters, she is in competition with the head of the company’s (played by Treat Williams) daughter, Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens, coming across as much more wholesome than she did in Spring Breakers), who is determined to rework the existing product on the market by making it only “slightly” organic.
Directed by Peter Segal, who has always orbited the comedy genre (see: his ultimate masterpiece, Tommy Boy), the movie gives loving visual care to the city J. Lo hails from, taking us on a journey not just through a sanitized version of Queens and the subway system, but also the polar opposite borough of Manhattan, where Rockefeller Center, the Flatiron and the High Line are all showcased to further attract the type of Midwestern audience that might be watching this to make a move. And naturally, in keeping with mainstream Hollywood, the script, written by Justin Zackham and Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, is filled with clunkers in terms of dialogue that has to be swallowed as the supposed spoonful of sugar itself. Though some might need a spoonful of whiskey to tolerate exchanges like, “Are you ready to have a family?” “You are my family…so yes.” This little “moment” between Maya and Trey only serves to accent the somewhat mixed message of Maya paving her own way in the end without needing to compromise who she is or what she wants. But hey, the film industry can only incorporate changing zeitgeists regarding feminism so quickly.
At the same time, one can’t help but still be charmed by the strange allure of someone as earnest as Lopez and the characters she tends to gravitate toward–the lower class underdog with more intelligence in her pinkie finger than any of the white folk she’s forced to kowtow to thanks to the never-ending power struggle, forever personified best by the class disparity of New York, where your job eligibility is only as good as your last degree and/or recognizably corporate employer.
With Second Act, J. Lo would have us believe that every day is a new chance to start over and potentially become the person you always wanted to be (that’s what America in general prides itself on telling us so that it can persist in the con of forcing us to be tantalized by playing the game at all). Which is precisely why she drives home that point with the accompanying song Sia wrote for the soundtrack, “Limitless.” Or maybe she just wanted that synergistic benefit of sales from a movie and music. Plus, the message of the song is an addendum to the film in case the voiceover spelling it out for you at the end was not enough.
