By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 20, 2025 |
It feels like there’s a tidal wave of bland movies and TV shows ripping off True Lies. There was the short-lived CBS series based on the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Schwarzenegger’s own Netflix knockoff FUBAR, and last year’s Apple TV+ flop, Mark Wahlberg’s The Family Plan, which was basically True Lies but with the whole family involved.
Now we have Back in Action, which is just The Family Plan with one minor tweak: instead of just Dad hiding his spy life, it’s both Mom and Dad (played by Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz) keeping their secret from the kids. The plot kicks off with Matt and Emily, former spies who faked their deaths 15 years ago after a botched mission, now living a quiet suburban life. Things unravel when their teen daughter sneaks out clubbing, and a fight involving the parents ends up on TikTok, blowing their cover and attracting a horde of old enemies hunting for a MacGuffin Matt hid during his last mission.
Of course, the MacGuffin is stashed in London at the estate of Emily’s estranged mother (Glenn Close), who — gasp! plot twist — is also a spy. She’s married to Nigel (Jamie Demetriou), a much younger man whose primary role is cracking awkward jokes about being a grandpa despite being younger than Matt and Emily.
The rest of the film is a barrage of bargain-bin action sequences that look like they were shot with the understanding that they’d be viewed on a laptop, interspersed with Foxx and Diaz bantering to distract from the lifeless plot. Kyle Chandler and Andrew Scott also show up as cartoonish would-be villains — Scott probably got the paycheck here that he deserved for Ripley, so something good came out of it.
It’s great to see Cameron Diaz back on screen after a decade-long hiatus, but I wish she’d picked literally anything else. This movie, written by Brendan O’Brien — who oscillates between decent comedies (Neighbors, Neighbor 2) and unwatchable disasters (2017’s The House followed by 2019’s Our House)— feels like it was paste spit out by an algorithm tube. Directed by Seth Gordon, the human equivalent of a directorial placeholder — the McG of Sean Anders — the film is nothing more than an assembly-line product with Foxx and Diaz acting as window dressing.
Back in Action isn’t bad in the sense of being memorable; it’s too generic for that. A truly bad movie at least leaves an impression. This is just loud, uninspired nonsense, the screensaver in motion. Foxx and Diaz occasionally inject some charm, but it’s not enough to salvage the canned dialogue. I fell asleep twice and rewound only to realize I’d missed absolutely nothing.
It’s the ultimate background movie for Netflix subscribers. It’s also that movie where someone asks if they should pause it when you leave the room, and you beg them not to. “No, please don’t. I’ve already seen it.” And even if you haven’t, trust me, you have.