We continue our third season of Ten Movies, delving deeply into the cinematic oeuvre of Jennifer Lopez. In this week’s episode, we watch the modern-day fairy tale ‘Maid in Manhattan’, in which a heroic working-class Latina single mom falls for a rich, handsome prince who appears to be suffering from a brain concussion.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcast
Listen to this episode on Spotify
Listen to this episode on Stitcher

The further we get into our Jennifer Lopez season, the more dismayed we are by the quality of her body of work. She’s really great in this role – a plucky, streetwise maid [in Manhattan] who is accidentally mistaken for a member of the ruling class by a wealthy politician – but the movie itself was disappointing.

On the one hand, it has potential beyond your bog-standard romantic comedy. It’s framed more like a fable – a retelling of the Cinderella story – which (somewhat) relieves the unrealism that obtains in romantic comedies. Plus it has an incredibly strong point-of-view on class – the divide between the haves and the have-nots is constantly referenced and illustrated in the film, with the movie firmly on the side of the multi-racial proletariat.

Yet the romance at the heart of the movie falls painfully flat, largely because of Ralph Fiennes as the handsome, wealthy, Kennedy-esque Prince Charming character. He’s just terrible. Hemal felt he was miscast and doing a straight-up bad job at being, you know, charming, while Brian felt the screenwriters had simply forgotten to give his character any motivation for upending his entire privileged life beyond “Hey, that’s a hot maid! [in Manhattan]”.

You’ll have to watch and see for yourself, but we fear – sadly – you will agree.