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Rating:
Enlivened by an intermittently gritty feel but marred by some seriously deficient romantic chemistry, Jennifer Lopez's first genuine blockbuster is ultimately a paint-by-numbers Hollywood vehicle that might as well have been produced in 1982 rather than the beginning of the second millennium. With its dashing Republican hero, sanitized class struggle, and Casio keyboard-demo score, Maid in Manhattan is as weirdly retrograde as romantic fantasies come. Director Wayne Wang seems to have tried to channel some of the generalized service-sector empathy that made his Brooklyn anthem Smoke memorable: The film stock and on-location settings are convincingly grungy, and the unforced (if visibly irritable) Lopez does a passable job of playing against her increasingly stratospheric offscreen persona. But the film's script is cobbled together out of the worst kinds of Screenwriting 101 clichés, not the least of which include a quirky-shy moppet of a son and a go-nowhere subplot involving the lead character's clash with her mother's old-world ideals. Still, the most depressing -- and depressive -- aspect of the film may very well be the autopilot performance of Ralph Fiennes, whose drowsy, faux-New England riche speech patterns and soft-focus stare suggest nothing so much as a Kennedy cousin recovering from invasive dental surgery. Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

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