In “Back in Action,” a domestic spy movie as generic as its title, Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, as CIA agents turned romantic couple, attend a children’s birthday party thrown by a Belarusian cyberterrorist, who they plan to infiltrate. But their identities are revealed within about five minutes. They must fight their way out of the criminal’s house, which they do in a long sequence of breathtaking confrontations, all accompanied by Frank Sinatra singing “L.O.V.E.” (“L… is for the way you look at me…”). The song, as used here, relies on irony with a trowel. It’s the movie’s way of saying: there’s no point, don’t take it seriously, turn off your brain and soak in the warm bath of this Netflix product of the week (because that’s what it’s all about).
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 there’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.
Matt (Foxx) and Emily (Diaz), who is pregnant, take advantage of the plane catastrophe to pretend to be dead and start a normal life. The movie then jumps to the present, where they are suburban parents with two children, Leo (Rylan Jackson), age 12, and Alice (McKenna Roberts), age 14. However, after following Alice to a nightclub where she is with several older men, they are dragged back into the conflict. In order for a cell phone video of it to go viral and expose them as former spies, they beat up a couple of the other partygoers to get her out of the club. This is a blatantly improbable scenario.
The family takes a plane to London, where Matt has hidden the ICS key—the movie’s incredibly dull MacGuffin—with their children now traveling with them. They can use it as leverage to obtain immunity if they find it and give it back to the CIA. However, the thing that everyone desires, including their former terrorist enemies, is crucial.
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.”
There is a marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry between the two performers, which makes them appealing. Additionally, the movie perks up and settles down for a while when Glenn Close plays Emily’s British mother, who was once a superspy herself. Despite being at least 40 years her junior, Close’s Ginny has a spy-in-training aide named Nigel (Jamie Demetriou) who also happens to be her lover. Furthermore, it turns out that Nigel is inexperienced. This leads to a humorous scene in which he must use a laptap to save London, and he responds much like the most of us do when faced with the frustrating digital logistical hurdle of the week.However, the true reason Nigel’s uncertainty is so comforting is that every character in “Back in Action”—heroes, villains, and children—is so confident all the time that the movie doesn’t allow for any comic-thriller elements other than dull, one-dimensional macho certainty.
