They got Jessica Alba out of retirement for the Netflix dollar, Cameron Diaz is next with “Back In Action”. And no, it’s not a remake of that 1994 action flick with Billy Blanks and Rowdy Roddy Piper; unfortunately, I wish it was a remake of that movie because it would’ve given me a lot more to talk about.
As is…..it’s the first genuine dud to come out of this January.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: two former spies retired from the field and fallen in love have to come out of retirement after being compromised to protect their family. Yeah, putting aside how it’s THAT basic and THAT superficial and glib in the type of cut-and-paste formulaic family adventure it wants to take you on, there’s too little of everything here despite trying to gaslight you into thinking otherwise. Every detail is aggravatingly one-note and is chock full of recycled, hacky, bland tropes of previous mediocre spy thrillers with the same eager distain for innovative, original filmmaking. It’s basically Mr. and Mrs. Smith for kids with a heavily shallow presnetation rooted in 90’s nostalgia and studio notes up the ass. That being said, we’ve all seen how these spy capers play out and they portray everything here with a stark Saturday morning cartoon lens; the tone is light and the tongue’s firmly in cheek so, at least they knew how they wanted to portray this.
Don’t get it twisted, it’s still another dime-a-dozen espionage potboiler seemingly created by a disgruntled AI assistant bumped with a lot of artificial tension but that’s not what ticks me off about the story; it’s the speed of how they choose to handle all that. The entire experience is five minutes shy of two hours and yet, its pacing is relentless jumping from plot point to “big moment” to expository dumb with nary a second to catch your breath. So even though no valuable time is discarded getting from point A to B, time is still wasted because of how everything feels like a placeholder.
That type of unambitious, pedestrian workmanship is carried over through Seth Gordan’s lethargy and malaise. His direction is just as half hearted as the events he’s written to guide us through and for all intents and purposes, there’s hardly anything noteworthy about it.
At this point, come to expect three things from these Netflix features: a gaudy-esque production design with humble locales that only look expensive but can’t properly convey the type of narrative it wants to deliver, a runtime that massively overextends itself purely for fluff and a PG rating that’s just as much a contradiction to the tone as the story, all of which is visibly hamstrung by the budget and fails to successfully harbor that illusion of fun. Don’t even get me started on the aggravating soundtrack not meshing with the action, Christopher Lennertz’s bang-average music score, uninteresting costumes and the constant barrage of middling wisecracks and clever quips that fail to justify this being a comedy.
Even with the better-than-average stunt work and so-so choreography, the action just isn’t staged all that competently. Sure, you can tell what’s happening but between the milquetoast variety of camera angles and hyperactive editing that would put Woody Woodpecker to shame, everything comes off so pinched in, restricted and small-scale that nothing’s really at stake here. And every character is treated with the least amount of respect possible. Not to say they were memorable to begin with but for the few characters that are interesting, the script reconstructs them to do something stupid just to avoid plot holes of their own design. More often than not, it only creates more in its place.
Bless Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx and Glenn Close for bumbling through this rote script with its forray of ramble dialogue to get this to work; everyone’s got one role to play and they barely succeed at that.
This is one of the most corporatized movies I think I’ve ever seen and the crazy thing is Netflix wants more movies like this: painfully generic, dumbed down theatrics subbing as background music specially designed to numb you to death.
