This may be the single most down-the-middle movie ever made. It feels like a blank space of 114 minutes in my brain. Like it was scientifically engineered to play in the background while you window shop or doom scroll on your phone. Miss something? Don’t worry, the film pauses every so often for the characters to recap everything that’s going on.
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From what you know of this movie, whether you saw a trailer or a log line or Neflix’s punched-up summary, imagine that in your head. Got an idea? Good. That’s exactly the movie this is. Word for word, beat for beat, quip for quip. It all unfolds in the most predictable, least interesting way. It’s almost like they tried to make a spoof movie called Generic Action Movie.
Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx play spies Emily and Matt. They’re also doing it on the down low. She gets pregnant. When a mission goes bad, they take the opportunity to dip and start a new life. Fast forward 15 years later, they’re boring suburban parents. You can tell because they drive a minivan, movie shorthand for boring suburban parents. Wouldn’t you know, their old life comes calling and they have to dust off their old skills to save their family. Oh, and the daughter (McKenna Roberts) hates Emily, for teen reasons.
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Foxx and Diaz have easy chemistry and are charming enough, they simply don’t have any substance to work with and their banter can only carry so much weight. It’s weird that this is what got Diaz to come out of “retirement,” but at least she looks like she’s having a good time and gets to say, “If you smoke pot, you get diarrhea.”
The only real highlights are Glenn Close as Emily’s horny, hyper-British, former-spy mother and her wannabe MI6 boy-toy (Jamie Demetriou). They get the most bang for their bucks, laugh-wise, but aren’t enough to create anything beyond drab momentary amusement. And the film squanders Kyle Chandler, as Matt and Emily’s former CIA boss, and Andrew Scott, a British agent who went on one date with Emily and still carries a torch for her.
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Back in Action is the latest in a long line of movies that will do big numbers on Netflix and that they will tout as a rousing populist success, but that no one will remember having watched a month from now. It’s the exact type of pricey but bland and toothless fare people so often deride the platform for churning out. (Which is too bad, because they actually released two of my favorite movies last year, Rebel Ridge and The Shadow Strays, as well as a number of other interesting films.) Instead of watching this, track down the 1994 Back in Action starring Billy Blanks and Roddy Piper.
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