WHETHER you remember her as a Sixties sex-kitten, Seventies activist or the fitness-video queen who made leg warmers fashionable, Jane Fonda’s big-screen return after 15 years is disheartening. In the lumpen comedy Monster-in-Law, she plays Viola, a veteran TV journalist who has just lost her job to a younger woman and now can’t face losing her only son to his fiancée, a multi-tasking temp called Charlie (Jennifer Lopez).

Fonda is reduced to a one-note Cruella De Vil of rictus grins and eye-rolling disdain. Her brand of brittle anxiety is completely out of place in would-be comic vignettes in which Viola feigns mental instability to make Charlie’s life hell. It’s a tedious battle in which the cutesy Lopez becomes equally unsympathetic when she fights back.

Wanda Sykes, as Viola’s tart-tongued assistant, steals her every scene. No wonder the director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) keeps cutting to her reactions in nearly every situation. He must have realised that Fonda and Lopez are not natural comics, while Fonda surely must have known how merciless Hollywood is with its ageing divas. Just look at Barbra Streisand hamming it up for lame laughs in Meet the Fockers. Lopez had better watch out: she may have seen her future screen career flash before her eyes.

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