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I'm serious, that's what you'll be searching for after you've had your fill of Jane Fonda's screaming in this movie. I'm pretty sure even two-year-olds who happen to walk into the living room while their parents are viewing this will be yelling at the screen for her to sit still and be quiet. On the other hand, it's not Fonda's fault, considering that she was given so little material to work with in the first place.

How Hollywood manages to botch such a simple story as a mother getting into fights with her son's fiancée is because of one key element: they think that pushing their actors to such degrading lows is funny. Now, I can see what some may be thinking: "But isn't that what comedy is: watching the characters suffer?" Well, that's all fine and good, but it has to have two things: purpose and effort. Monster-in-Law has none of that. I guess if there were a different reason for her screaming (such as, for example, a mental issue that causes her to act like a child when angry or stressed... Yes, that's a thing), then I would be able to forgive it more easily. But the excuses they give us are so tired and so cliché (i.e. Being replaced in your career by someone younger) that you either can't care for what happens to the characters at all, or become even more infuriated when Fonda's character does something incredibly stupid. It also doesn't help that the humour, aside from all the screaming, is merely just slapstick and gross-out gags, which furthers the theory that the writer simply gave up on any thought process after coming up with the premise.

As for the rest of the movie, there's not much else to say. The plot (or whatever resembles one anyway) loses direction after Fonda's character is introduced, and quickly devolves into said poor excuses for "comedy". The why-can't-we-all-get-along moral of the story feels shoe-horned into the last scene of the story, as though the crew forgot to put it in until far into production. The characters are so bland and blatantly stereotyped (which wouldn't be so bad if it were intensional) that most of them fade into the background. As for J-Lo... Well, to be fair, nothing can be worse for her acting career than Gigli (which is not saying much, unfortunately).

I know we can't expect a masterpiece after fourteen years of absence from the silver screen, but, unfortunately, the efforts Fonda turned out were all in vain. She deserves much better treatment than what they gave her here.

Movies like this are like an irreparable watch. No matter how many times you try to clean it, replace the battery, or alter it in some way, it will always be no longer able to function. The only solution, in that case, would be to just abandon it and obtain a new one. But if you know Hollywood, they tend to take the "what you see is what you get" approach in order to squeeze the next buck out of us. But this time, the joke was on them; this movie flopped at the box office at the time of its release, and for good reason.

This movie was doomed from the very minute Michelle Pfeiffer and Tim Burton backed out during pre-production. As soon as you try to get someone new to direct, write, and star, people should expect different ideas from different people. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the script was being tossed back and forth from writer to writer 27 times in order to "perfect" the so-called "story" about a Batman character that wasn't particularly strong enough to have a movie based around her in the first place, and the title role was being recast more times than was deemed necessary. It also shouldn't come as a surprise that the end result was something with so much coherency squeezed out of it that it no longer resembled Bob Kane's work (they probably should've left his name off the credits after the 5th revision).

I like Halle Barry as much as the next person, but she's just way too wrong for the role, and she knows it (her Razzie acceptance speech can be found circulating around YouTube to justify this). I could be counted amongst the large mass of people that thinks the director picked her because she was able to strut perfectly in the strangely skimpy costume. But, I think I can also safely say that the poor quality of her performance that was turned out in the film was not a fault of her own; she's given so very little to work with that it's impossible for her to take the role of Patience Phillips' Catwoman seriously without looking ridiculous. (... "Patience Phillips"? Really, Hollywood? Was "Selena Kyle" too over-the-top for you?) The supporting cast doesn't help matters either, judging from the fact that they either have characters that are only on screen to be awkward, or they (almost) always give the camera the "what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here?" look.

The visuals offered in this movie are far from practical, from a CGI Barry performing impossible stunts in some scenes, to extreme long shots of CGI buildings that seem unfinished. My guess is that Warner Brothers spent so much money on getting the script finished and Barry cast that the thought of having anything inanimate or non-human on screen was inconceivable, even if it meant they had to animate them properly (to them, of course).

All in all, there's nothing salvageable here, but it's also very easy to see why it has a cult following that's developed over the years just for its horrible quality. If you have the urge to break out a DVD copy of this movie and pull it apart with some friends, feel free (though I wouldn't recommend making a drinking game out of it, for those of you of legal age; it's that stupid).