J.Lo’s Career Identity Crisis Needs a New ‘Monster-in-Law’

Welcome to modern rom-com week at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed! In honor of two big romance releases this week—The Fall Guy and The Idea of You—we’re celebrating everything we love about the last 15 years of romantic comedies.

Jennifer Lopez has the work ethic of 100 people, 15 horses, three donkeys, and me after two cans of sugar-free Red Bull. That’s why she needs to dance with a cane: She’s a lot of woman to support! Hopping between an action movie about an assassin stricken with maternal guilt, to an album all about your marriage (complete with accompanying short film and documentary, lest we forget), to an upcoming sci-fi thriller about a dystopian universe where AI has taken over would be a daunting task for anyone. And yet, Lopez has persisted, making it look as easy as rocking up to the bodega counter and ordering her preferred meal of ham and cheese on a roll and a bag of chips.

Lopez seems consumed by the need to prove to the world that she can do anything and be anybody. It’s a commendable effort, especially when something like her childhood bodega order can be lambasted online in Reddit threads questioning the veracity of her love of orange drink. For years, J.Lo has been the butt of the internet’s joke, a favorite to pile on whenever carpal tunnel-ridden thumbs need something new to post about. Various threads on X detail all of the “stolen” songs in her discography—a common misconception about the standard music industry practice of using vocals recorded in a demo as backing vocals in a finished song. Other times, a venture at audience connection will be an outright failure, like when her attempt to start the #LoveDontCostAThingChallenge was met with crickets, along with plenty of observations over how loudly those crickets were chirping.

Who can blame J.Lo for going bigger and bolder now that her attempts at modest sincerity are met with such scrutiny? Why cater to the average music-listener or movie-watcher when it will only result in most of them writing it off entirely? Lopez’s resistance has certainly generated some interesting projects—I don’t know that I’ve seen a pop star do something as compelling as her three-pronged media takeover surrounding This Is Me…Now in years. But her pivot from her humble beginnings to these sorts of outsized projects means that one of the things J.Lo became known for, her rom-coms, have all but dried up—at least in the more traditional sense.

In the early-to-mid ’00s, Lopez was the indisputable rom-com queen. Any actor would kill for a run like 2001’s The Wedding Planner, 2002’s Maid in Manhattan, and 2004’s Shall We Dance?. These movies saw J.Lo fitting so snugly into the every-woman archetype; she could play a housekeeper, a ballroom dance teacher, or a wedding planner with a chameleonic grace. These were humble roles in believable films, far cries from the high-concept rom-coms Lopez does now, where she plays gun-toting brides and gullible pop stars. Those recent movies are, at best, fine, but the wildly different parts speak to J.Lo’s cinematic identity crisis. She is no longer the every-woman—she is no woman. Relatability has been stripped from Lopez’s choice of roles, and there is only one thing that can bring her back down to earth with the rest of us: another Monster-in-Law.

Before I get ahead of myself, I am not calling for a Monster-in-Law 2. (Aw, who am I kidding? I’d open 12 credit cards and buy out as many theaters as I could, just to make sure that a sequel to my favorite romantic comedy of all time does well at the box office.) I simply believe that the 2005 film starring Lopez and Jane Fonda is the exact formula that J.Lo could stand to start emulating again. In the movie, Lopez plays a dog walker named Charlie, who also temps as a cater waiter and a receptionist. It’s at one of those temp jobs that Charlie meets her soon-to-be fiancé Kevin (Michael Vartan), whose mother, Viola (Fonda) is the country’s preeminent newsmagazine host—think Diane Sawyer’s demeanor with Barbara Walters’ skepticism.

Turns out: Viola’s a massive diva, raging alcoholic, and all-around huge bitch who is as protective of her son as she is her liquor cabinet. When her long-running network talk show is canceled to replace Viola with a younger host, she finds herself with plenty of time on her hands to meddle in Kevin’s upcoming nuptials. And though Charlie is willing to put up with a certain amount of in-law stressors, Viola quickly pushes the humble dogwalker to bark and bite as much as her canine clients do.

When Monster-in-Law was released 19 years ago, critics and audiences didn’t respond favorably. The film holds a paltry 18 percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where aggregated reviews leftover from 2005 say the film is a Wedding Planner doppelganger (they are nothing alike, other than that they star J.Lo as a woman who eventually gets married) or that it’s all about catfights (duh!). In those days, brilliance just wasn’t appreciated like it is now, and if my 27 rewatches of the movie since 2005 have confirmed anything, it’s that Monster-in-Law is a slice of comic genius that J.Lo has been unable to replicate in her career in the two decades since.

But the film is not just successful because it’s a laugh-a-minute riot, or because the costume department provided Jane Fonda with a swath of beautifully tailored suits to wear, or because Lopez, Fonda, and Wanda Sykes—who plays Viola’s best friend and assistant, Ruby—are game for any and all physical comedy bits. Monster-in-Law works because it’s so completely removed from the J.Lo brand. The mold that Lopez created for herself in the aughts, which she has only amplified over the last 20 years, was hyper-glamorous and sexy. When you thought of Jennifer Lopez, you thought of owning your curves, defying the paparazzi, and running headfirst into love and romance. Even in rom-coms where she played someone more conventional, Lopez found ways to elevate her characters, even if it was ever-so-slightly, to fit them into this type. (The hotel housekeeper Lopez played in Maid in Manhattan, Marisa, fit that bill, given that she hailed from the Bronx, just like J.Lo).

But Monster-in-Law offered something different: Lopez at her most dowdy. Charlie walks along California beaches, pulled by packs of giant dogs, wearing outfits that Ashley Tisdale would’ve flat-out fired her stylist for so much as suggesting she don during that same era—and that’s saying something. Charlie is J.Lo as the literal every-woman: She has multiple jobs, a freewheeling, independent spirit, and is unencumbered by anyone else’s perceptions of her. Those qualities all help Lopez disappear into the role, and they’re also why Charlie is such a formidable foil to Viola’s menace. Unlike all of the impossibly famous people that Viola surrounds herself with, Charlie can’t be bought or schmoozed. Her defiance is precisely what makes Viola feel so volatile and keeps the two women at each other’s throats, often quite literally. Considering how opposed they are, the basis for their ensuing high-low warfare is totally plausible, and the movie ratchets the strain to harebrained heights.

Whether J.Lo is throwing herself off a couch, Sykes is helping Fonda poison her future daughter-in-law, or Fonda is screaming about Charlie being a—gasp!—temp, there are approximately 500 notable quotables and memorable moments in Monster-in-Law. The same just can’t be said for Lopez’s most recent attempts at revitalizing her rom-com roots. Do you know a single line from Marry Me? (And, no, the earworm chorus of the title track does not count!) I didn’t think so.

And it’s not that Lopez is the sole reason why these films don’t connect as easily as her earlier work did. Slashed budgets and prioritizing franchise content are responsible for the lack of noteworthy rom-coms too. But now that J.Lo is such an undeniable star, with carte blanche over her career and the roles she chooses to pursue, wouldn’t it be more fascinating to see her play the every-woman again? To become that person, Lopez would have to take on the greatest challenge of her career so far: convincing the world that she is as still as humble as her Bronx roots and dogged work ethic suggest. If she can pull that off, it wouldn’t just be the ultimate middle finger to her doubters. It could also be a brilliant enough twist to secure that Oscar gold she’s so desperately seeking.