While prepping for Friday morning movie review coverage on local television (FOX19 in Cincinnati), I found myself sitting through a slog of a double feature Thursday night at my multiplex home away from home. Television coverage is all about the big ticket box office items with the glitzy names, which means I had to hunker down for the Jennifer Lopez vehicle – The Boy Next Door – and Johnny Depp’s disastrously unfunny action-comedy Mortdecai. Both movies feature recognizable names in their casts (Boy Next Door has young wannabe boytoy Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Kristin Chenoweth and Hill Harper, while Mortdecai has even bigger guns like Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor, Paul Bettany, and Olivia Munn) who likely figured that the movie would give them a chance to work together, if nothing else. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with J-Lo or Depp, right? And if something special comes from the collaboration, then that’s icing on the cake.

Well, neither movie proves to be all that special. In fact, it is their very pedestrian takes that doom each. Boy Next Door needs some B-movie kink or an unexpected twist to liven things up. At the very least, I would have taken a few laughably cheesy lines or a truly preposterous set piece to let me know the story simply didn’t care about maintaining any connection with the real world. Instead, director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, Alex Cross) gives us exactly what we might imagine coming from this tripe. He fails to dress it up, suds it up, or strip it nekkid in any way. This is a hack’s hack, nothing more, which makes it much less in the end.

Mortdecai suffers from a similar affliction, painting itself, in its trailers as a wacky Grand Budapest Hotel-style romp (although decidedly broader in its execution), but within moments of the lights going down, I found myself hoping against hope that it would splatter the screen with some Austin Powers-type hijinks. Go hard and bold for spoof laughs with just enough action to let me know it could handle spy craft. Unfortunately, director David Koepp (the screenwriter behind Mission: Impossible and Spider-Man) displays a stunning tone-deafness when it comes to the mixing of the action and comedic elements, rendering each with an awkwardness that borders on the cringe-worthy. Depp continues to troll around in the weird character realm, searching for another Captain Jack Sparrow, I suppose, when maybe its just time for him to focus on something more than the idiosyncratic bits that never quite add up to a truly human being.

When it seems as if all hope is lost from the big names, Jennifer Aniston sneaks into the frame and damned near saves the day. She’s been gathering strong buzz on the festival and awards front for her work in Cake, from Daniel Barnz (the writer-director of Won’t Back Down and Beastly). She plays Claire, a woman struggling to deal with chronic pain whose life starts to truly unravel when a member of her support group (Anna Kendrick) commits suicide, leading her to question her own efforts to hold everything together. The film embraces its indie roots, sticking to the smaller character-driven aspects of Claire’s junky-esque experience, her bleak cynicism in the face of crushing hurdles, the obvious privilege that hovers over her existence. And the cast here, as in both of the other movies, draws heavily upon familiar faces – Kendrick, Sam Worthington, Mamie Gummer, Chris Messina, Felicity Huffman, and William H. Macy – but there is not a sense of stunt casting at play. This group wants to invisibly do the work of creating folks who stumble through life; people we might see around us and wonder about their stories.

That sense begins and ends with Aniston. She’s known for her work on Friends and for her tabloid life, but we tend to forget that there is an attuned sensitivity to her performances, when she’s given material to live in. The problem with Cake is that it is not the kind of film that you expect to hear about on a Friday morning review segment. Mainstream audiences will not consider lining up for Cake on a Friday night dinner and a movie date. I’m not sure I can even wholeheartedly recommend it, on its own merits. It is too small, in ways, too much of a television movie project injected with hints of indie cred, but what I can say (and can’t say enough) is that Cake beats the pants off the choices made by J-Lo and Depp. Those two picked roles and movies for the Friday night crowd. Aniston, who easily could have been in either of their movies, understands that she doesn’t have to settle for crowd pleasing; she can please and challenge herself to elevate a project beyond its meager expectations.

For that reason alone, Cake may sweeten our appreciation of what it means to be a top performer. (tt stern-enzi)