Jersey Girl | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film

Publish date: 2024-07-11
Gigli: an apology. In common with many critics, I may have suggested there could be no worse cinematic experience involving erstwhile lovers Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez than their mobster comedy-thriller Gigli. I now see that this is not the case, a painful insight on which I have had time to reflect on the private clinic hospital bed from which I am dictating this review.

J-Lo and Benno are back - back, I tell you! - in a machine-tooled weepie, directed by Kevin Smith. Ben sports a film of cold sweat that never leaves his upper lip, matching the one glistening on my forehead. He's the smart-alec New York PR, whose lovely wife J-Lo dies in childbirth, a tragic event signalled by Lopez looking faint and then rolling her eyes up into her head.

So Ben adorably has to bring his little girl up on his own, helped by a regulation grouchy widower dad in blue-collar New Jersey where he was brought up - a neighbourhood whose wholesome family values are finally contrasted, with magnificent insincerity, to slick'n'shallow Manhattan. This unthinkingly reactionary cliche, combined with the brutally manipulative sentimentalism, makes Gigli look golden.

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