Seth Gordon’s Back in Action stars Cameron Diaz, in her first film role since 2014’s Annie, opposite Jamie Foxx as a retired C.I.A. couple now living as civilians and trying to raise a family. The filmmakers draw from a lineage of spy films like Mission: Impossible, as well as lighthearted subversions of the spy genre like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Incredibles, to create a deeply unimaginative family comedy that ostensibly has something to say about parent-child relationships. Unfortunately, that, too, is mostly seasoning for the blandest of plots.
The film kicks off with a prologue of Matt (Foxx) and Emily’s (Diaz) exploits as a C.I.A. couple that ends with them narrowly escaping from a downed plane set up to kill them. Learning that Emily is pregnant, the two resolve to live as civilians. But leaving the spy life behind proves harder than expected for these adrenaline-junkie parents, both emotionally and literally, as shadowy forces from their past return to take back what Matt stole from them years ago.
Spy films tend to showcase the sensual side and mystique of spy work, but that’s wholly absent in Back in Action, where Foxx and Diaz feel utterly sexless and awkward as they rattle off expository lines to advance the plot or explain things that happened on screen seconds earlier. “Everybody’s gonna think we died in that crash, right?” Matt asks Emily as they walk away from the plane wreckage in the film’s prologue. It’s dialogue that makes no pretense of any naturalism, reminiscent of how video game characters explain a mission to the player as they walk. In effect, Foxx and Diaz give off a chemistry that starts and ends at “awards show co-hosts,” doing their best to deliver quips as if reading the teleprompter in each other’s eyes.
There’s a stretch in Back to Action, after Matt, Emily, and their two children, Alice (McKenna Roberts) and Leo (Rylan Jackson), have escaped to London, where it transforms into a road movie so lackadaisical that the sight of Matt quickly turning a gas pump into a flamethrower feels that much more amusing for how leftfield it is. But such curveballs, comic and otherwise, are few and far between throughout the film, which, as written by Gordon and Brendan O’Brien, largely proceeds as if were working its way down a checklist of the conventions of the spy genre.
Indeed, there’s inherent entertainment value to seeing Diaz beat up a few teenagers, and Glenn Close, as Emily’s mother, deploying knives and frying pans to take down the small army of heavily armed soldiers that have sequestered the James Bond/M composite inside the kitchen of her luxe manse. But Back to Action is otherwise awkwardly beholden to the most banal of spy tropes, as evidenced by the multiple scenes of data being downloaded.
The star power driving the film feels mismatched given that it doesn’t have a theatrical release and will only be available to audiences on a streaming platform. It’s a film with a serviceable concept, charismatic stars, and expensive music licenses. Yet frustratingly, it squanders all of it to create the type of movie that you might expect Netflix to make with A.I. in the future.
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“Matt quickly turning a gas pump into a flamethrower” – a brief online search shows that the inevitable outcome of that would be Matt himself on fire because there is so little pressure in the flow of fuel. These thoughtless films are risible when subjected to even the lightest examination. Was the CIA involved in co-writing or co-producing? Tom Secker’s Spy Culture blog will, I hope, eventually expose this one.