Released: 17th January
Seen: 22nd April
In 2014, Cameron Diaz did something quite admirable. After the release of Annie, she announced her retirement to spend more time with her kids. Considering this was Cameron Diaz, one of THE major movie stars of the era, for her to stop working on her own accord was a major thing. This was one of those celebrities who could sell a movie just on their name alone being attached. She had a two-decade-long career that was the envy of many others in her generation, and then she just chose to stop acting. People have been hoping she’d make a return for ages, almost since the day she announced her retirement, but she stuck to her guns until this year when she took part in the Netflix film appropriately titled Back in Action, her grand return to the movies… she deserved better.
Back in Action tells the story of a pair of spies, Emily (Cameron Diaz) and Matt (Jamie Foxx), who have been doing missions together for quite some time before it turns out that Emily is pregnant, and so they decide to leave the spy world and become parents instead. This goes well for a while until the inevitable thing happens, namely an old colleague named Chuck (Kyle Chandler) turns up on their doorstep to tell them that someone from their last mission has tracked them down and is coming for them so Emily and Matt have to avoid a horrible, horrible death at the hands of a bunch of very unsubtle-spies while also keeping their kids safe. Oh yeah, their kids don’t know that Matt and Emily are spies, so there’s a secret that they’re trying to keep while acting obvious as all hell. You know the plot of this already, it’s nothing new, so why bother pretending you haven’t worked out every beat of this thing already?
Back in Action feels like a movie that was made in the mid-2000s, because it almost certainly lifts from every action movie that was big around that time. All the classics are here, from shootouts in a public street where it’d be impossible to not be viewed as some kind of terrorist incident to bad green screen effects to several double crosses that are badly thought out all revolving around a bullshit deus ex machina that we have to pretend to care about for 2 hours. It’s not new or interesting, it’s pretty much what you expect. You know that the second one of their former colleagues turns out that it’s going to end in a brutal gunfight in their nice suburban home. You know that every scene of them driving will turn into an elaborate car chase that somehow only ends in the bad guys getting hurt. You know that the red herring character that spends the entire film looking evil will probably turn out to be good. It’s all been done so often before that there’s nothing here to capture anyone in the audience, but that’s kind of the point.
Back in Action is what a lot of people think of when they think about the state of Netflix original films nowadays, big flashy spectacles with a few recognisable names that have so little of interest about them that you can just put it on in the background while doing anything else. It’s not cinema, its content meant to occupy space for the few weeks after it was released. This film came out in January. I’m only reviewing it now because I have the time and wanted to catch up on some films from the start of the year, but in those three months, this film is no longer being talked about. Sure, a lot of people saw it at the time, but no one cared.
There’s nothing to care about because Back in Action is not a film that’s relying on good writing, creative set pieces or interesting characters. It’s relying on names you know in a location you’re kind of familiar with doing elements of a plot you know well enough that you don’t have to think to hard… fortunate because paying attention actually hurts the film, paying attention means you notice some of the shoddy editing choices that ruin the jokes or have to ask “Who the fuck are you?” when a seemingly major character turns up in the third act for a few seconds.
What Back in Action has going for it, if anything, is the undeniable star power of Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. It’s proof that Cameron still has that undeniable it factor that made her a superstar; she can literally phone in a performance after being out of the game for 10 years, and it’s still entertaining on some level. Jamie Foxx is also the same engaging sensation he’s always been, clearly he’s doing a lot of work to make his character fun and leaning into Jamie’s natural comedic sensibilities, but he makes it work. They work well off each other, you want to see the two of them do well… you just also wish they were in a film that had an actual script instead of the Cliff Notes from Mr and Mrs Smith and Spy Kids.
Jamie and Cameron both deserve better than this, hell EVERYONE in this film deserves better than this. Glenn Close in particular deserves better than this, that woman doesn’t need to do this kind of shit, she needs to be working on Sunset Boulevard so we can hurry up and get her the fucking Oscar she deserves instead of running around in a bad English accent pretending to shoot a gun and make out with an average looking 37 year old… just saying if you’re going to make Glenn Close play a cougar, that woman deserves one of the Marvel Chris’ to play her boytoy.
What’s truly annoying is that I can’t even compliment Back in Action on the actual action scenes because those are basically at the level I might expect from a recent season of Law & Order but not from a major blockbuster. The compositing on several scenes looks bad, the timing of the fights just doesn’t work at all and there are more than a few moments where it just makes no sense what is going on. The closest the film comes to a fun and inventive action scene is when someone throws a Coke bottle into a car after dropping a Mentos in and the resulting explosion results in the car flipping. Sure, the car flip looked cool (what parts of it we actually saw) but beyond the silliness of using Coke and Mentos for one scene, nothing is interesting or unique about any of it. So much of the film feels stock standard, like Netflix is ticking off a list of shit they know people like in action comedies and is following that to the letter but it can’t be bothered doing anything more than the absolute bare minimum.
Back in Action is a brainless film that gets by on the charm of its leads and the goodwill of people not watching the damn thing. If you put it on but don’t actually pay attention, I’m sure it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly offensive about it; being offensive would suggest effort was made to be unique in some fashion and that’s not a thing this film is interested in, but there’s also nothing about it that’s worthy of attention. It’s a film designed to fill space, to present a poster that people will click on because they know the two stars above the title and that’ll do the job. Why bother making art when you can just kind of get by with basic blandness? It hurts no one, it helps no one, it’s been out for 3 months and I feel confident that the second I post this, I will fully forget every frame of this film because there is nothing about it worth remembering. It’s lovely we have Cameron Diaz back, we missed her and her talent, now can someone please give her something worthy of her return!
Movie Meister Reviews 