‘Back in Action’ Review: Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz in a Domestic Spy Caper as Generic as Its Title
As married CIA operatives who dropped out and have to come back, Foxx and Diaz anchor a Netflix product-of-the-week movie where nothing's at stake.
In “Back in Action,” a domestic spy caper as generic as its title, Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, as CIA operatives who’ve become a romantic couple, attend a kids’ birthday party thrown by a cyberterrorist from Belarus whose safe they’re planning to break into. But their identities are unmasked in about five minutes. They have to fight their way out of the criminal’s mansion, which they do in an extended sequence of bone-breaking face-offs, all accompanied by Frank Sinatra singing “L.O.V.E.” (“L…is for the way you look… at me…”). The song, as it’s used here, lays on the ironic jauntiness with a trowel. It’s the film’s way of saying: Nothing’s at stake, don’t take it seriously, turn off your brain and sink into the warm bath of this Netflix product-of the-week (because that’s all it’s here for).
Seth Gordon, the director of “Back in Action,” thinks in cartoon-reality terms. He thinks that’s his job, and setting ultraviolent action sequences to old standards is just about the only playbook “Back in Action” has. Our heroes are on an MI6 plane when they’re ambushed by the flight attendants, whom they proceed to lay waste to as Sinatra sings “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” (haha). The pilot gets shot, the plane is going down, but here’s Frank, bopping away. Later, Foxx and Diaz use gas-station hoses as flamethrowers to incinerate some thug attackers; the images of people burning alive are accompanied by Etta James singing “At Last” (“At last, my love has come along…”). They win the fight, but make no mistake: This is the entertainment strategy of a misanthropic hack.
Popular on VarietyAfter that plane crashes, Matt (Foxx) and Emily (Diaz), who is pregnant, seize the opportunity to fake their own deaths and begin a normal life. The film then cuts to the present day, when they’re suburban parents, with two kids, 14-year-old Alice (McKenna Roberts) and 12-year-old Leo (Rylan Jackson). But they’re drawn back into the fray when they tail Alice to a nightclub, where she’s in the company of some older dudes. They take her out of the club by beating up a couple of the other partiers — a flagrantly implausible scenario, but it’s necessary so that a cell-phone video of it can go viral and out them as former spies.
With their kids now along for the ride, they fly to London, where Matt has stashed the ICS key, the film’s super-dull MacGuffin. If they retrieve it and return it to the CIA, they can use it for leverage to gain immunity. But the key is the thing everyone wants, including their own old terrorist foes…
Watching “Back in Action,” it feels like some producer took the original, overblown, raucous-with-gunfire-and-highway-crashes 2005 movie version of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the one that wasted Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and said, “Bring me something just like this — except don’t make it so goddamn intellectual! I want it dumber, louder, without all that wimpy dialogue.” There isn’t much of an espionage plot to “Back in Action.” Basically, the movie consists of Foxx and Diaz beating the living shit out of people — and, in between, acting as breezy and clueless and innocuous as if they were playing the parents in a reboot of “Family Ties.”
The two actors are appealing; they’ve got marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry. And when Glenn Close shows up as Emily’s British mother, a former superspy herself, the film calms down for a bit — and perks up. Close’s Ginny has an assistant, Nigel (Jamie Demetriou), who is a spy-in-training and also her lover, even though he’s at least 40 years her junior. And Nigel, it turns out, does not know what he’s doing. This produces a funny sequence, when he has to save London by tapping the right things into a laptap, and he reacts exactly as most of us do when confronted with the infuriating digital-logistical hoop-to-jump-through-of-the-week. The reason Nigel’s unsureness is such a balm is that everyone else in “Back in Action” (heroes, villains, kids) is so cocksure at every moment that the film leaves no room for any comic-thriller ingredient beyond boring one-dimensional badass certitude.
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