Review: Second Act

Like Jennifer Lopez herself, Peter Segal’s Second Act attempts to wear many hats. It begins, harmlessly enough, as a straightforward romantic comedy where Maya (Lopez) uses her street smarts to climb the corporate ladder. But this initially simple tale of a woman—armed with nothing but a GED—asserting herself in the workplace becomes increasingly muddled and needlessly complicated by subplots involving everything from multiple adoption backstories to a tree that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There’s also frequently jarring and abrupt tonal shifts into maudlin melodrama and an absurd and blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist to help turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.

After being denied a promotion at the Queens big-box store where she’s worked for more than 15 years, Maya begrudgingly goes to her birthday party and complains to her best friend, Joan (Leah Remini), about corporate management’s refusal to value street smarts as much as book smarts. And after Joan’s son, Dilly (Dalton Harrod), cooks up a fake résumé and social media accounts for Maya that paint her as a Harvard grad who’s fluent in Mandarin, she gets the chance to prove herself at Manhattan’s premier consumer products firm, Franklin & Clarke.

But her catastrophic rise in the corporate sphere comes with complications beyond the predictable fish-out-of-water comedy that ensues. Maya struggles not only to keep her false identity hidden from her new employers, but to tell her longtime boyfriend, Trey (Milo Ventimiglia), that the reason she doesn’t want a family is that she gave up a child for adoption when she was a teenager. Maya is a woman of many secrets, but without them, she’d barely exist as a character. Amid a stream of pratfalls, cheesy montages, and a cringe-inducing sing-along to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It,” Second Act awkwardly forces a connection between these two storylines with a coincidence that virtually pushes the film into the realm of pure fantasy.

Even if you’re willing to make the enormous leap of faith to accept this stroke of luck that instantly cures Maya of her psychological hang-ups, Second Act never gives her a consistent enough voice to render her remotely authentic as a character. Segal’s film instead tries to make Maya a woman who can please everyone in the audience. She’s a good potential mother and a successful businesswoman; street smart and down to earth as well as exceptionally fashionable; vulnerable and compassionate yet ruthless and hungry for career advancement. Much like the falsified identity that skyrockets her to top of the corporate food chain, Maya is a composite of conflicting qualities that never really gel beyond the most cursory of glances.