Cameron Diaz returns to the big screen but heaven only knows why she chose Back in Action
“Sometimes things are good weird, like how we can still listen to Michael Jackson…”
The constant Netflix churn, particularly where its big-name films are concerned, does throw up something interesting every now and then. Back in Action has the distinction of being the movie that has tempted Cameron Diaz out of more than a decade of retirement but as a lazily written would-be action comedy, directed by Seth Gordon from a script he co-wrote with Brendan O’Brien, you have to wonder if it was worth it.
With their eye keenly on the family market, this has all the hallmarks of an attempted first swing at a franchise. Diaz and Jamie Foxx play Emily and Matt, daredevil spies who decide to go off the grid after a gig goes awry right as they find out that they’re expecting a baby. Fast-forward 15 years and with a second child added to their brood, they’re tucked into suburban life but when their cover is finally blown, they’ve 2 teenage(ish) kids to take on the run with them.
McKenna Roberts and Rylan Jackson do their best but their presence skews the whole film as it can no longer be all-out action but nor can it go full-on comedy. Gordon and O’Brien end up in family sitcom territory and so much of the film ends up in that laboured, completely unoriginal mode. Squabbling family banter is rarely entertaining and there’s so much of it here, made even worse by the soundtracking of several fight scenes to swinging songs from the Great American Songbook.
Diaz is OK but as she’s never asked to get out of second gear, this isn’t the vehicle to enhance any of her strength. Foxx is treading water and it is telling that the film has to tell us he is hot, rather than, you know. Glenn Close as Emily’s estranged and upper-class British mother is baffling, as is Jamie Demetriou as her lover, Andrew Scott was presumably paying for an extension as he sleepwalks through a supporting role as a rival MI6 agent.
