Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx balance parenthood and CIA activity in the Netflix action comedy, Back In Action. A review:
In order to meditate, it’s important to first empty your mind. Forget about your worries. Focus on the present moment, not the past and the future. Become one with the universe. Become nothing.
Watching Back In Action is like meditating, in that you can watch all 114 minutes of it and feel absolutely no emotion whatsoever. You’re simply in the moment, gazing at shimmering lights, feeling all semblance of self ebb away.
As Bruce Lee once said, in order to empty your mind, you need to be “Shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in the teapot, it becomes the teapot.”
If you pour water into Netflix, it turns out, you get a singularly generic action comedy vehicle for Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. It’s a spy thriller that feels a bit like True Lies, a tiny bit like A History Of Violence, and an awful lot like The Family Plan, an action comedy vehicle for Mark Wahlberg quietly released on Apple TV+ in 2023.
That film saw Wahlberg play a former assassin now living a quiet life as a family man and used car salesman, but whose violent past is brought back into the present when his image appears on social media.
Back In Action sees Diaz and Foxx play Emily and Matt, a pair of ex-CIA superspies who put their old lives behind them and settle down to have a family. But then their violent past is brought back into the present when footage of the pair appears on social media.
Years earlier, Emily and Matt had recovered a cyberterrorist weapon, capable of shutting down power stations and nuclear reactors, from a Russian oligarch. The tech MacGuffin, dubbed The Key, was lost during an incident involving a jumbo jet, and various organisations are still looking for it in the present day. With their lives in danger from terrorists, Emily and Matt go on the run with their teenage daughter Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her younger brother Leo (Rylan Jackson) in tow, hoping to find The Key before the villains can get their hands on it.
Directed by Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses, Baywatch), who co-writes with Brendan O’Brien, Back In Action has a few decent vehicular stunts ā including a quite cool shot of a car flipping up in the air ā but a plot so formulaic that you can probably predict what’ll happen in the final hour just by watching the opening 15 minutes.
The familial drama draped around the spy thriller plot is also the stuff of a thousand other American comedies. Teen daughter Alice is at an age where she’s getting into clubbing, boyfriends, and stomping about going, “Ugh! Fine.” Her younger brother is tech savvy but less outgoing. Matt and Emily play at being ideal parents but secretly yearn for the adrenaline rush and glamour of their old lives.
Much of the film takes place in and around London, where the plot introduces a bunch of characters that amount to little more than placeholders. Kyle Chandler plays Baron, Emily and Matt’s old CIA handler. Andrew Scott appears as an MI6 agent ā much like the slippery C he played in Spectre ā who’s after The Key and has a longstanding crush on Emily. Glenn Close shows up as Ginny, Emily’s estranged mother who shoots pheasant on her vast estate and canoodles with her simpering English boyfriend Nigel (Jamie Demetriou), the latter providing some Jar Jar Binks-like comic relief.
They’re all fine, because they’re all far too talented at their jobs not to be. Similarly, Foxx and Diaz are too charismatic not to make at least something out of roles that give them little more than a few mildly cringe-worthy quips to round out their personalities (āSometimes things are good weird, like how we can still listen to Michael Jackson,ā mumbles Foxx).
It’s a mystery, though, why Diaz chose this as her comeback movie after more than a decade away from acting. Maybe it was the chance to work with Foxx again (they previously appeared together on her last film, 2014’s Annie). Maybe she relished the idea of doing more action, like her Charlie’s Angels days.
Whatever the reason, Back In Action is another quintessentially Netflix thriller. The fight sequences aren’t bad, but suffer from the same problem filmmakers face when mixing Hollywood stars with stunt people who can actually throw a punch ā every move, feint and tumble requires about six edits to create the illusion that it’s Jamie Foxx getting kicked over a table.
In short, Back In Action feels precisely engineered to be as acceptable and broad as a comedy thriller can possibly be. Netflix’s algorithms suggest that its subscribers reliably click on undemanding thrillers like these; Red Notice, Carry-On and The Gray Man are among the ten most watched films in its history. You could put a gun to this writerās head and he wouldnāt remember what happened in any of them.
Back In Action is so templated, so lightweight, that reviewing it is like critiquing a thin mist ā or, perhaps, water pouring in a teapot. Back In Action will almost certainly have dropped out of our collective memories within days, but it will probably also soar to the top of Netflix’s top 10 at the same time. In that respect, it’s mission accomplished.
Back In Action is streaming now on Netflix