Bad Mother-in-Law joke

REVIEWED - MONSTER-IN-LAW: It's handbags at dawn for J-Lo and Jane Fonda, and Donald Clarke's advice is to stay well away.

WE all know how difficult it is for women over a certain age - about 19 or so - to secure decent roles in Hollywood movies, but the 67-year-old Jane Fonda, appearing here on the big screen for the first time in 15 years, could surely have found something less demeaning to do with her time than trade bitch-slaps with Jennifer Lopez. Was Hilary Duff not hiring grandmothers this month? Monster-in-Law, a grim mudslide of a comedy, whose most notable achievement is to make the not dissimilar Meet the Parents seem like a masterpiece, casts Fonda as Viola, a testy TV journalist - imagine Barbara Walters with rabies - forced to deal with the news that a younger, stupider woman is being lined up for her job. At about the same time, her son (Michael Vartan), a doctor with more stubble than personality, falls for a pretty waitress-cum-dog walker played by the glob of squandered potential that is Ms Lopez. Her head all fouled up with mortality and Oedipal longing, the superannuated newshound decides to tear the young lovers' relationship apart.

It sounds like the stuff of tragedy and, sadly, that is just how the senior star chooses to play it. Whereas brassier contemporaries such as Bette Midler or Barbra Streisand would at least have brought volume to the role, Fonda - the gloomiest cast member of both Cat Ballou and Barbarella, remember - appears to be making a serious attempt to find humanity in Viola. Even if the script had offered Jane the odd half-decent line, it would have still seemed cruel to laugh at the pathetic, troubled personality this so-serious actress has created.

Just to demonstrate how such roles should be declaimed, the venerable Elaine Stritch, playing Gertrude, Viola's own mother-in-law, turns up at the close to caw and hiss like a less cuddly Lady Bracknell. None of which is intended to suggest that simply tinkering with the performances could possibly salvage this terrible, terrible film.

Directed by the man who inflicted Legally Blonde upon us, featuring such gag-inducing cliches as the gay confidante and the sassy African-American factotum, Monster-in-Law sees Lopez continue what must be the most consistent run of rom-com catastrophes in cinema history.

And now she is dragging Jane Fonda down with her. The John Birch Society and the Veterans of Foreign Wars will surely be organising private screenings.