After a few interesting turns in alternative mainstream fare like Oliver Stone's underestimated U-Turn, Soderbergh's excellent Out of Sight, and the Woody Allen-voiced Antz, Lopez has become an in-joke and a cottage industry. She's attempted to wrest the comedy of bad-behaviour crown from Julia Roberts with The Wedding Planner, to wrest the battered avenging angel crown from Ashley Judd with Enough, and, twice failing (she did take the almost-uncontested "badly miscast as a cop" crown from Melanie Griffith with Angel Eyes in the interim), takes a stab at the Drew Barrymore adipose pundit crown with this stillbirth. She's low enough now that she actually mocks the size of her own ass in this picture, revealing not so much a playful self-awareness as the kind of resigned good humour reserved for performers at the end of the line subjecting themselves to Friar's Club roasts.

Marisa (Lopez) is a maid for a chichi Manhattan hotel who, at the urging of her tough-talking hoochie-mama fairy godmother Stephanie (Marissa Matrone), tries on an expensive ensemble, gets mistaken for a socialite (yeah, right) by smooth-talking Republican lothario (yeah, right) Christopher (Ralph Fiennes), and engages in a series of delightful (yeah, right) slapstick misadventures as the two fall hopelessly in love. Stanley Tucci is again (and always) wonderful in a thankless role as the politician's harried spin-doctor (here's hoping that whatever Tucci got for his last few thankless roles buys another Joe Gould's Secret or Big Night), and Bob Hoskins (I know!) is a total anachronism as some sort of relic from The Remains of the Day, there to provide Maid in Manhattan its single most pathetic pyrrhic victory. That Marisa will be outed by a snooty competing member of the ruling class (Natasha Richardson, hideously embarrassing) is never in question; that she will engage in a series of dim-witted and base monologues meant to illustrate her insouciant funk, also no surprise. What really wounds is the revelation that there's actually an interesting movie in Maid in Manhattan and that its been suffocated at conception by its Munchausen-by-proxy mum. Punish the vehicle to adore the star.

Beware, then, the film that casts Lopez as a single mother. The child in Maid in Manhattan is Ty (Tyler Posey), a miserable collection of cute dysfunction obsessed with Richard Nixon and the music of Bread and Simon and Garfunkel, and so needing the gentle ministrations of a replacement father figure that he should just dress up like a Dickensian street urchin and start loitering outside Big Brothers of America HQ. What would garbage like this be without Ty overcoming his fear of public speaking to reunite working class mom and Prince Charming (see also Pretty Woman) in a rosy, never-in-doubt finale (that nevertheless takes its own sweet time getting to where it's going)? Reason for the delay is attributable to a general lack of interest, but a couple of musical montages are more directly responsible: the "dressing up" montage that correlates almost directly to the "in training" montage in similarly idiotic underdog action films, and the bittersweet "breaking up is sad" music video that would always be sad for the right reasons were it not always sad for the wrong ones.

Screenwriter Kevin Wade has been here before (plumbing the shallow deeps of underdog push-button race in Mr. Baseball, of juvenile gender in Junior, and of lugubrious love stories in Meet Joe Black), making Maid in Manhattan the sort of gruel producible through generations of boiling down the bones of old stews. Only the lovely cinematography of Karl Walter Lindenlaub rises above the quagmire, turning the slumming co-stars and struggling starlet into picture-perfect figures in postcard New York. It's almost worth the effort of Lindenlaub to sit through the damned thing. On the other hand, no it isn't.-Walter Chaw