Starring Jane Fonda and Jennifer Lopez. Rated PG.

Jennifer Lopez can't stop getting married. She recently wed singer Marc Anthony in real life and now her new film, Monster-In-Law, is the latest evidence to support this theory.

Slightly more amusing than The Wedding Planner and a whole lot less engaging than her ill-fated liaison with Ben Affleck (and let's not forget her two brief marriages before that), this latest installment in the J-Lo wedding collection is exactly what you'd expect it-and her-to be.

These days, Lopez might be too overexposed and undertalented to be convincing in any other kind of movie role. (Remember how good and tough she was in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight?) But the real story here is where Jane Fonda fits in. Fonda plays Viola Fields, an aging anchorwoman who loses her job to a smooth-skinned ingénue and subsequently suffers a nuclear hot flash on live TV.

After a brief stint in a psychiatric facility, Viola goes home to find that her cherished only son, Kevin (Michael Vartan), has found a new girlfriend, Lopez's scatterbrained Charlie, who works as a temp and has a bizarre habit of wearing sundresses over pants. He takes Charlie home to meet his mom and then promptly pops the big question in his mother's presence. This sends Viola into a psychotic paroxysm, complete with her beating pillows and moaning. Her mission from then on becomes to prevent the marriage. Thus is born the mother-in-law from hell-a concept invented just for this movie!

Like Lopez, Fonda is no stranger to marriage, but she appears to draw gusto from her experiences (even Ted Turner couldn't tame her) and takes charge of the film from the moment she appears. She breezes through the hallways of her TV station like a grand dame on steroids, and, later, as the scheming matriarch on the warpath, she makes Mommy Dearest look like an autobiography of Mother Teresa.

After a 15-year absence from the screen, it seems strange that two-time Oscar-winning Fonda would choose to make her comeback in a film as pedestrian as this. But even so, Monster-in-Law benefits from her seasoned talents. A sporadically amusing Sunday-matinee date movie (mostly for the already married), it leaves one hoping that Fonda keeps acting-and, perhaps, that Lopez doesn't.