Mark Reviews Movies: SECOND ACT

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | December 20, 2018

The title Second Act refers to the protagonist's second chance at life and a career in middle age, but it might as well serve as a warning for when this movie goes off the rails. The first act of Justin Zackham and Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas' screenplay establishes a somewhat clever dilemma: A woman is unwittingly given a new, more employer-friendly identity that better suits her ambitions than her actual experience.

It's fraud, of course—maybe not legally but definitely on a moral level. That's the dilemma: She has to keep up false appearances, as over-the-top as the details of her fake résumé and social networking profiles may be, in order to keep her job. From that, we get the conflict: Can she deal with the fact of the lie, because it has given her exactly what she wants? From there, we have the central question: If she can actually do the work, does the lie really matter?

For some reason, though, the movie abandons almost all of these concerns in its second act. The reason is a barely referenced piece of information about Maya (Jennifer Lopez), the woman who gets a second chance at life under false pretenses, that suddenly and quite coincidentally comes to the fore. The movie, which hasn't even begun exploring the problems of Maya's fake identity and the moral quandary that comes from it, gives her an entirely new, entirely more difficult dilemma to confront. By that point, the story is so caught up in a plot, as well as the comedy, involving Maya's work- and fraud-related issues that it gives short shrift to the more emotionally weighty subplot.

For 15 years, Maya has worked at a local big-box store. Her career goals are limited, though, because she never went to college, and the company has a minimum-qualification policy for any position of middle management or above. Despite offering and executing ideas that have seen the store flourish, Maya is stuck as an assistant manager.

As a 40th birthday present to her, Maya's godson Dilly (Dalton Harrod), the son of her best friend Joan (Leah Remini), creates a new identity for her, featuring an elite education, a list of employment with major companies, and pictures of her at Mount Kilimanjaro and with the Obamas. It works, and despite her reservations, Maya takes an interview at a beauty-care company, where she impresses CEO Anderson Clarke (Treat Williams) and becomes a marketing consultant. She doesn't impress Anderson's daughter Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens), a VP at the company, who challenges her to a professional competition to come up with a new product.

The setup establishes a lot—none of it, really, having to do with where the story actually goes. Maya's boyfriend Trey (Milo Ventimiglia) is eager to marry and start a family with her, but he breaks up with her because of her reluctance in that regard. It's refreshing that the Zackham and Goldsmith-Thomas don't make getting him back into a plot point, but that also makes the character mostly useless. As for the Maya's new job and the competition, it provides some gags (one, in which she's trying to impress a Chinese businessman by speaking Mandarin, is amusing, since she's receiving her lines from a veterinarian who's giving a physical to a dog), as well as a collection of slightly offbeat characters.

It's fairly routine and unimpressive stuff, so the screenwriters' decision to take it somewhere different might seem like a benefit. That different direction, though, involves the fact that Maya gave birth when she was 17 and gave up the baby for adoption. Completely by coincidence and screenwriting convenience, Maya ends up meeting her biological daughter under circumstances that "force" her to continue her lie with the daughter.

The thinking behind this additional subplot to the story is almost impossible to discern. It's obvious that the movie doesn't care about the relationship between Maya and her daughter in any way beyond it serving as a complication to the deceit—except, perhaps, as a means of emotional manipulation. Tonally, the move doesn't fit in with the rest of this narrative, which tries, without much success, to be a comedy of errors (It's tough to pull that off when the protagonist always succeeds).

It feels like a cheap way of adding depth to this story. The problem, though, is that Second Act doesn't care to look deeper. It starts as a superficial comedy about working-class concerns, only to become a superficial drama about far more real ones.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray