Back in Action puts Cameron Diaz back in the game
But Diaz, having taken nearly a decade off from acting to get married, write a few books and start a few businesses, jumps back in the saddle with an energy and a playfulness that’s infectious, and she’s well-matched with her co-star Jamie Foxx, who knows how to breeze through prefabricated junk like this and give us as good a time as possible.
She plays Emily and he plays Matt, black-ops specialists for the CIA who are mopping up a mission in the opening minutes of Seth Gordon’s film when Emily announces she’s pregnant and Matt, to her surprise, is gung-ho to start a family.
Neglecting to inform their company minder, Chuck (Kyle Chandler), the two go off the grid into deepest suburbia.
Cut to 15 years later and the couple are parents to Alice (McKenna Roberts), the rebellious 14-year-old daughter required by the genre, and Leo (Rylan Jackson), an agreeable adolescent nerd.
Both children are more gullible than they probably should be about Mum and Dad’s hazy stories of Peace Corps work, but all is well until Emily and Matt get into a bar room brawl that shows off their fighting skills and are suddenly all over TikTok as boomer ninjas. Their cover blown and bad guys from 15 years ago popping out of the woodwork with machine guns, the family is forced to go on the run.
The villains are after the usual MacGuffin – here it’s a computer widget called the ICS, “a master key for some of the world’s most critical infrastructure”, which when you stop to think about it is a really stupid idea.
Emily, Matt and the kids have to get to where it’s hidden first, which means involving Emily’s mother, Ginny, a superspy who in the words of one secondary character is “an MI6 girlboss legend”. Employing a patently fraudulent British accent, Glenn Close has as much fun with the role as is legally permitted.
Director Gordon (Horrible Bosses) keeps things moving along while sticking to the template, pausing as necessary for fight scenes, chase scenes, gunfight scenes. Many of these are scored to retro pop hits: Dean Martin singing Ain’t That a Kick in the Head? or the Etta James classic At Last. It’s delightful the first time, amusing the second time, and then it’s done the third, fourth, and fifth times.
Andrew Scott, he who shall be forever known as the Hot Priest from Fleabag, has a thankless role as a prissy British rival for Emily’s affections, and Jamie Demetriou – that TV show’s “bus rodent” – digs for laughs as Grandma’s wacky boyfriend/trainee spy.
The kids are fine. What raises Back in Action just above the level of Netflix’s most reliable genre – the ‘Fall Asleep Halfway Through While Lying on the Couch with a Half-Eaten Pint of Ice Cream in Your Lap’ movie – is the amusingly tart banter between Emily and Matt and the chemistry between the actors playing them.
The script by Gordon and Brendan O’Brien (Neighbours) has its bright spots before caving in to formula mayhem in the last 20 minutes. “They’re not criminals,” insists Leo when he and his sister are still in the dark about their parents’ true identities. “They’re in a pickleball league. They make sourdough.”
“Good parents lie all the time,” Matt reassures his wife in another scene. “That’s how you raise great, well-rounded kids – by lying straight to their faces.”
There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.
Late in the movie’s 2022 production, Foxx had a medical emergency that was later revealed to have been a hemorrhagic stroke. He’s been replaced by a double in some action scenes, not that you can tell, and has since made a nearly complete recovery (which he discusses in his current Netflix special, Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was …).
As with their characters, he and his co-star are pros who know how to enjoy themselves while turning an old sow’s ear into – well, a middle-aged sow’s ear.
Welcome back, both of you. Now, go find a better script.