Let's Talk About That Bonkers Ending to 'The Boy Next Door'

Warning: Major Ending Spoilers, obviously.

There have been three types of reactions to The Boy Next Door, that box-office hit where J.Lo plays a high school literature teacher who gets seduced and then stalked by her 19-year-old HIGH SCHOOL student/neighbor: (A) It’s awful (we see you, critics); (B) It’s amazing (we see you, Cinemascore); or © It’s so awful it’s amazing (or, as The Daily Beast put it, “bad-brilliant”). This writer is firmly in the © camp.

And here’s a major reason why: That absolutely asinine/awesome climax (oh, no, I’m not talking about that super-steamy sex scene between J.Lo and Ryan Guzman, which was indeed awesome and actually drew applause from the advance screening I attended).

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The Boy Next Door is one of those self-aware campfests that could’ve ended 20 minutes in with a single police call (and at five-minute increments from that point on), that has countless cheeky lines (“I love your mother’s cookies”) and that fully delivers with a fiery, far-fetched, utterly-ridiculous-in-all-the-right-ways finale.

Here’s how it plays out: With all the chips on the table — we know with absoluteness that Guzman’s Noah Sandborn is a raging sociopathic lunatic (as if there was ever any doubt) who killed his own father, and he’s very likely to kill again if J.Lo’s Claire Peterson doesn’t elope with him to wherever in his twisted mind he imagines paradise (probably Orange County) — Noah draws Claire, her cheating but charming husband, Garrett (John Corbett), and their anaphylaxis-suffering son, Kevin (like Kirk Lazarus said…), to the rural farmhouse of her vice principal, Vicky Lansing (Kristen Chenoweth). It should be noted that there’s not any logical reason for Vicky to live on a farm — she’s single and WASPy, and certainly doesn’t look like the agricultural type — but we’re gonna need a barn for all the magic to happen.

Claire snoops around Vicky’s darkly lit house, finds her dead body in a closet, spends a minute or two screaming over it, then moseys on outside, where, before she can drive away (or call the police), Noah greets her with a gun to the head. He forces her to the barn, where he’s got Garrett (who cheated on her with a woman who smells like chocolate chip cookies… there’s a heavy cookie motif in this movie) and Kevin tied up.

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Noah makes his intentions known that he’s going to kill the both of them unless she elopes with him to Orange County (again, presuming)… though it becomes clearer that he’s going kill them both either way. He then pours enough gasoline on the straw-covered ground to set the whole county on fire… yet when he does set the barn ablaze and things get really wild, the fire doesn’t spread, it remains in perfectly situated atmospheric distances from the guys tied up.

Claire is eventually able to knock Noah out (momentarily) with a shovel, but like any victim facing off against a killer in a movie, dares not finish the job, and he resurfaces just Claire’s frees the fellas. Garrett, the cheating bastard that Claire has pretty much forgiven by this point, will eventually get shot in the gut, while Kevin, whose anaphylaxis gives him serious stress-related allergic reactions, is losing his s—t. Mind you, the barn is still on fire.

Then comes the money shot(s): Claire, who has hold of the EpiPen auto-injector used by Kevin, is in a struggle with Noah and is able to stab it him right in the eyeball with it. The audience goes wild, because, without exaggeration, this may be the single greatest eye-gouging scene cinema has ever produced. Then, with Noah still fighting, she’s forced to finish the job off with her finger. Ewww!

But, wait! There’s more. (Also, the barn is still on fire. It’s been at least five or 10 minutes now.) Noah is still fighting, but Claire is already reciting The Illiad back to him (something about “Heroes don’t always win, Noah”… Oh yeah, I neglected to mention that like her, Noah’s kind of a literature snob, and earlier in the film gifted her with an expensive first edition of Homer’s classic). Why? Because, while we don’t know this yet, she’s located that magical lever that exists in all movie warehouses, factories and farmhouses, and she’s about to pull it down, and it’s about to send some massive heap of steel down on top of him from the ceiling, CRUSHING him into a human pancake. Cue the ambulance send-off for Garrett, and it’s a wrap.

And that, folks, is how you end a movie that’s so awful it’s awesome. What did you think?