J Lo's 'Halftime' documentary was not what we expected (not in a good way)

We wanted a lot more 'Jenny From The Block' and a little less Jennifer Lopez, Super Bowl Co-Headliner. Was that too much to ask for from 'Halftime'? Probably.

Look, we know the documentary was supposed to be centred around Jennifer Lopez's 2020 Super Bowl Halftime performance with Shakira, but... did it have to be so heavily focused around it?

When we heard about Lopez's Netflix documentary, we were pretty excited for it. She's a beloved diva who grew up hungry and hardworking, deserving of all of her accolades as a dancer, actress, singer, award winner, and seemingly lovely person.

For someone whose brand is coming 'From The Block', we just expected there to be a lot more about her early life and the build up to becoming J-Lo, the Super Bowl Halftime performer, rather than detailing the semantics of putting the (very impressive) show together.

There were some details about her childhood and upbringing — we learned just how hard her mother was on her, and it came across quite brutal at times, but she credits that toughness to a lot of her success today. She's meticulous; every detail for her Super Bowl performance had to be fine tuned by her, she's no hands-off artist.

She's resilient, a 'Hustler'; even when she was sick, she was pushing to get the job done and she'd never let you know she was unwell. It was endearing to watch her face criticism; people told her she'd never be a singer or an actress because she was a dancer, but that only encouraged her to grit her teeth, knuckle down, and prove them wrong.

But for all that, the story felt rushed, spliced with too much unbalanced juxtaposition between then and now; the story didn't have enough early footage or input from interviewees that were around during those times, so the documentary leaned on too much recent history and too many confessionals from Lopez herself.

It felt like storytelling went out the window at times, with too much jumping around and not enough substance. Sure, her recent achievements are important, and one could argue that the clue is in the title, but to that end we say: purely focus on the Super Bowl performance then.

As Devil's advocate, it's conceivable that perhaps as an Irish audience, we're missing some of the emotion behind the Super Bowl; to be frank, we don't want to see the mechanics of the show in such nitty gritty detail because we just don't really care about it. Conversations between Lopez and Shakira about who gets 13 minutes and who gets 11 minutes to perform are not as interesting as J-Lo as Selena.

With too many interruptions from the past and not enough meat to flesh them out, the story felt too disjointed to be enjoyable to watch, honestly. With that said, we know we may be looking a gift horse in the mouth here, but... we couldn't the gift have been old clips of J-Lo and Ben on the yacht together?

Watch J-Lo's 'Halftime' documentary on Netflix.