Jennifer Lopez’s Recent Run Of Increasingly Terrible Projects Proves She’s Totally Fine Being A Fading Movie Star — But Not A Great Actress

Jennifer Lopez has been a movie star for more than 25 years. Like a lot of true stars, the compelling tension that informed her when she became a household name at roughly age 30 remains very much in place decades later, even as the particulars may have changed. In Out of Sight, a classic star-making performance (with the unfortunate footnote that the movie wasn’t as big a box office hit as Anaconda), Lopez was both hard-edge and softly romantic as Karen Sisco, a tough U.S. Marshal who unexpectedly falls in lust and possibly love with a charismatic bank robber played by George Clooney. She spends the movie chasing him down, chased by her own nagging doubts over what she’ll do when she catches him. The woman who would be J-Lo pops off the screen while delivering a nuanced portrait of a professional ass-kicker, just the pitch of no-nonsense glamor. Even moreso than her recent, lauded, and arguably snubbed work in Hustlers, her performance deserved an Oscar nomination.

As Lopez became a bigger star, her two sides started to feel more segregated. There was the rom-com/traditional women’s-picture J-Lo of The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, and Monster-in-Law, and then there was the thriller J-Lo of The Cell, Enough, and Parker. The latter side emerged less frequently; maybe she was spooked when the twain met again for Gigli, an all-time bomb starring once and future paramour Ben Affleck. Anyway, the softer stuff was more successful, until one too many movies like The Back-Up Plan and a generally contracting rom-com market diluted her run of popular hits.

When Lopez returned to wide-release movies after a few years of mostly voiceover and documentary work (although: were others aware that she did a movie with Viola Davis called Lila & Eve?!), she seemed poised to continue alternating hard and soft, as she did back in the 2000s; the light empowerment-anthem-as-movie Second Act was followed by the gritty Hustlers which was followed by the romance Marry Me. Hustlers in particular felt like evidence that Lopez was back: Back in the business of working with good filmmakers (something she had largely avoided since her Soderbergh/Tarsem days), back down to earth after feeling larger than life so long, yet not performing a faux-humble abdication of her fame, either. Some of us even wondered if her presence might be compared to someone like Al Pacino, during his run playing charismatic/problematic mentors, star power serving as a characterization shortcut.

What’s followed since then has looked like Lopez reclaiming her power to make increasingly terrible movies, including the new Netflix sci-fi picture Atlas. To their credit, her recent projects do attempt to re-combine her softer side with her harder-edged capabilities, while trying out different genres like a true renaissance woman: Shotgun Wedding does this most literally as an action-comedy about a wedding, while The Mother gives the old-star-goes-HAM formula a more feminine spin, and Atlas is her first sci-fi movie since The Cell! (Unless you count The Boy Next Door because the characters behave like aliens.) All of them make Lopez look “good” (glamorous, desirable, in terrific physical condition) at the expense of making her look good (at like, acting).

It’s not even subtextual in Atlas, where one character identifies Lopez’s title character, a military analyst fighting the war on futuristic AI-generated terror, as suffering from vanity. The movie just means that Atlas is intransigent and self-confident about her conviction that she can stop the AI threat, but it’s hard not to also think about how her character is, by the movie’s math, supposed to be 38 – just the latest sign of movie-star vanity after she played a pop star characterized as “north of 40” in Marry Me and a pregnant military operative in The Mother, both made when Lopez was “north of” 50. (I don’t recall Shotgun Wedding specifying an age, but characters definitely talk about what great shape she’s in.)

And to be clear, Lopez is in great shape, and can pass for 38. I have no doubt that she could, in certain light, pass for 29. It’s not as if her best performances, in Out of Sight and Hustlers, really attempt to dress her down. (Maybe that’s why she didn’t get nominated for Hustlers; at her age, you’re supposed to ugly yourself up and cry, not perform an impressively acrobatic dance routine!) But her recent movies fail to capitalize on her best work by focusing so intently on movie-star vanity: the kinds of movies a big star “should” be making, to glorify that star’s image and keep it at the center of the frame whenever possible. Lopez shows little affinity for the kind of green-screen performing that a movie like Atlas unfortunately requires, and the project itself shamelessly knocks off multiple sci-fi movies, a far cry from the visual invention Lopez submitted to in The Cell – not a great movie, but certainly an interesting one. The existence of Atlas, meanwhile, feels completely synthetic, a direct-to-video mockbuster that’s somehow flattered its way into a major star’s heart. I know there are people who love Maid in Manhattan, but are there really fans of Shotgun Wedding? Or just Lopez fans who think, OK, good enough?

Some of this can probably be blamed on the streaming economy; a lot of these companies know how to lure stars with simulations of their earlier career peaks, but don’t actually figure out how to make these movies work on their own. But Lopez clearly has designs on maintaining a certain level of superstardom; just look at This Is Me…Now: A Love Story, a cameo-packed feature-length companion to her latest record, attempting to keep pace with the “visual album” extravaganzas favored by Beyonce-level world-beaters. It’s a $30 million self-funded music video compilation designed to sell J-Lo as both a lovelorn romantic and a good sport, and while of course she’s welcome to spend her money and follow her artistic muse as she pleases, it makes her concurrent movie projects feel all the more like brand management.

Lopez isn’t alone in making crappy streaming movies, or treating her image as a brand, or showing signs of ego. Sometimes these things are inextricable from a star’s basic appeal. Maybe she deserves credit for acknowledging, by playing a globally famous pop star or an impossibly fit badass, that she can’t always just be Jenny from the Block after several decades in Hollywood. But both sides of her persona now feel so burnished and overly toned that there isn’t much room for the vulnerability she showed in Hustlers that made so many fans and critics excited to see her in a movie again. Her recent run of movies pay great tribute to her beauty – if nothing else, Atlas offers memorably curly J-Locks! – while at the same time denying her a full-motion physicality, so central to her best work. They feel shot for the poster, or the streaming tile, never really bringing her to life. (This Is Me may be ridiculous, but at least she gets to dance in it.) At her best, Lopez can be both imposing and sensitive, brash and relatable, shifting those balances around in a way that can feel unpredictable. Her post-comeback movies suggest that deep down, she’s no longer sure why, exactly, people love her, and she has to sell both sides of herself all over again.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) 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, too.