The ads for Marry Me, currently streaming on Peacock and showing in movie theaters, have trumpeted Jennifer Lopez’s return to the romantic-comedy form she once conquered. From a purely statistical perspective, this makes sense. Excepting her voiceover roles, most of her highest-grossing movies have been either thrillers or rom-coms, with Maid in Manhattan and The Wedding Planner giving rom-coms the edge. Yet for all of her success in that genre, she doesn’t have a signature on-screen partner in the vein of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, or even Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. The classic example of Lopez sharing chemistry with an actor isn’t in a romantic comedy at all; it’s the crime/caper picture Out of Sight, where she and George Clooney all but light the screen on fire.
So clearly, Lopez can generate heat. Why, then, have so many of her rom-coms felt like chronic mismatches? Let’s take a selective tour through her fictional love life and figure out what went wrong.
Lopez first played the rom-com game in 2001. After several grittier turns, she paired up with Matthew McConaughey for The Wedding Planner (currently streaming on Peacock). This was also McConaughey’s first real romantic comedy, and he seems like a good match for Lopez: They both have movie-star charisma that doesn’t feel buffed to a generic shine. But—perhaps because they were both novices in the genre—The Wedding Planner doesn’t seem to trust them, shellacking its stars with glossy contrivances. How strange it must have been in 2001, to see the star of Out of Sight opposite the star of A Time to Kill in a movie that comes across like Sandra Bullock’s leftovers.
That’s not true of Maid in Manhattan (currently streaming on HBO Max)—adjusted for inflation, this 2002 rom-com is still her biggest live-action movie. Lopez plays Marisa, who works at a posh Manhattan hotel, where she is mistaken for a rich customer by a handsome politician (Ralph Fiennes). Director Wayne Wang grounds the Cinderella-riff trappings with a keen eye for the inner workings of the hotel, and Lopez expertly combines scrappy pluck with movie-star glamour. It’s an appealingly old-fashioned production; it makes sense that it was a hit.
Yet there’s still a chemical vacancy at the center of the movie. The movie catches Fiennes before his uproarious second career as a droll comedian in the likes of In Bruges, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Hail, Caesar!—he perpetually feels on the verge of loosening up without quite hitting either the Jimmy Stewart or the Cary Grant mark. Despite some charming moments, never really connects with Lopez, and, absent strong banter, his character’s flirtations come across, at times, a little pervy—like he’s quietly relishing the power imbalance he isn’t even aware of. Their opposites-attract narrative has too many opposites, and too little demonstrable attraction.
After Maid in Manhattan and a couple of projects with her once-and-future partner Ben Affleck (Gigli is too misguided to work, though she and Affleck aren’t as off-putting as their rep), Lopez did a bunch of movies that could be more accurately described as rom-com-adjacent, focusing on the travails of domesticity: Monster-in-Law, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and The Back-Up Plan (now streaming on Paramount Plus). Back-Up is probably the most traditional romantic comedy of the three, and it’s a perfect case study in how viable leading men were abandoning ship from the genre by its 2010 release, leaving stars like Lopez to more or less fending for themselves. Lopez, playing a career gal who meets the man of her dreams just after she’s gotten pregnant via an artificial-insemination procedure, is paired with Alex O’Loughlin, an Australian actor whose American accent sounds unnervingly like Matt Dillon, playing an insecure dullard whose problems are purely plot-driven.
It’s not really O’Loughlin’s fault; The Back-Up Plan is terribly written, too laughless to reach the level of a mediocre sitcom. It doesn’t help, though, that a star of Lopez’s magnitude is paired with someone who looks and acts like, well, a guy from a second-tier CBS procedural (right after this movie, O’Loughlin jumped on board for a decade of the Hawaii Five-0 revival). Fiennes and McConaughey may not spark with Lopez, but they don’t actively make her look worse. The Back-Up Plan has such a profound lack of romantic zest that it starts to self-destruct almost immediately. Watched in a vacuum, it would be difficult to understand why Lopez ever became a star.
Marry Me is the first Lopez rom-com to really lean into that star quality, rather than consigning her to “relatable” tragically-single cliches. In her weakest movies, Lopez comes across like a singer-turned-actress, even though she was actually doing movies before she made hit records. Her new film finally admits that yes, a Jennifer Lopez type could mean a globally famous superstar, not just an everygirl striver from the Bronx. Her Katalina Valdez isn’t straight up J. Lo Plays Herself; at least in terms of her fictional career, she’s an amalgam of Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, and Beyonce, whose music Kat’s most closely resembles. Still, Kat lives in a world that probably more closely resembles Lopez’s day-to-day. The movie pairs her with Owen Wilson for what is, essentially, a role-reversal of Maid in Manhattan: Here, Lopez is now the rich and powerful figure who falls for a “regular” person, while Wilson plays the Lopez part from Maid—the humble single-parent thrust into a fancier world.
Owen Wilson’s chemistry with Lopez isn’t exactly Clooney-level; Marry Me is neither a swoon-worthy romance nor an especially funny comedy. (As with a lot of rom-coms, the “com” factor means that the characters are basically nice people, not that they make good or even very many jokes.) It still might be the most convincing romantic-comedy relationship Lopez has forged so far. Wilson is veteran of countless buddy pictures—he’s teamed with on-screen partners as disparate as Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, and Jackie Chan—and his easy-breezy manner makes him sweetly unflappable in the face of a particularly regal J-Lo. The reticence that defines so many other Lopez love-interest roles is part of the point here—and works better for a rom-com about people who are (whether the movie admits it or not) in their 50s. In that sense, the movie pairs well with Hustlers, which was also conscious of Lopez’s dynamo image while finally acknowledging that she’s no longer an ingenue. This rom-com queen still hasn’t made a classic of the genre. But she’s still got time to find true on-screen love.
Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.