A pair of former secret agents have the rug pulled out from under their suburban family life retirement in Back in Action, now streaming worldwide on Netflix. The first film in more than 10 years from lead actress Cameron Diaz is as disposable as most of these direct-to-streaming family-action-romance-comedies, and feels awfully similar to last year’s The Family Plan with Mark Wahlberg, but a peppy soundtrack full of pop hits and a pair of fun performances keep this engaging enough for anyone who has put it as background second-screen entertainment.
For anyone paying active attention at the events unfolding in this by-the-numbers would-be thriller, meanwhile, Back in Action might prove to be a frustrating experience. The screenplay, credited to director Seth Gordon and Brendan O’Brien (Neighbors) consistently sacrifices character motivation in order to move its cast from point A to point B, resulting in an often-confounding experience where logic goes out the window.
In Back in Action, Diaz and Jamie Foxx play CIA spies Emily and Matt, who open the movie on secret mission at an undisclosed location in the Czech Republic (while these scenes were shot in Slovenia, license plates and on-screen hints reveal the intended Czech setting). They’re tasked by superior Chuck (a criminally underutilized Kyle Chandler) with infiltrating a birthday party at the residence of Polish baddie Balthazzar Gor (Robert Besta), and swiping The Key, a vague weapon of destruction, before it can fall into the wrong hands.
The agents are successful, but ambushed on the plane back home, which crashes in the mountains yet leaves our protagonists completely unscathed. Given that Emily is pregnant with Matt’s child, they decide to fake their own deaths in the plane crash and start over. Apparently, the CIA doesn’t have a great retirement package.
Fifteen years later, they’re living in suburban Atlanta under new identities with two kids: 14-year-old Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her younger brother Leo (Rylan Jackson). Things are going great until they’re caught on video kicking ass in a local bar while trying to protect Alice, and Gor’s mercenary group Volka show up on their doorstep the next morning.
Back in Action follows a familiar formula from there, with the family taking it on the lam to London as they head towards Emily’s estranged mother and former MI6 agent Ginny (Glenn Close), losing both the mercenaries and active MI6 agents, played by Andrew Scott and Fola Evans-Akingbola, along the way.
What’s the plan? There’s been some semblance of coherency up to this point, but Back in Action makes less and less sense the longer you watch. Matt has stashed The Key at Ginny’s estate; he says he knew they would need it one day. But unless his plan is to hand it over to the mercenaries in exchange for their safety, it’s unclear what he intends to do with it.
The script, meanwhile, needs Matt to do what he does so The Key can come back into play and, uh, open the Thames Barrier? And don’t bother trying to understand the motivation of the antagonist who sets all this into motion, who has mourned our heroes for years… before retroactively imagining a 15-year-old grudge and concocting an elaborate revenge plan in the few hours since he found out they’re alive and well.
Of course, most viewers aren’t watching Back in Action for John le Carré-level espionage intrigue, if they’re even paying attention at all. And on a surface level, Back in Action does a lot of things right, including a lot of proficient action choreography set to a bubbly soundtrack of pop hits from over the years, from Dean Martin to James Brown to Salt-N-Pepa.
The actors, too, do everything they can to keep this thing afloat. Diaz and Foxx have some real chemistry here, and are a lot of fun as the middle-aged parents who spark things up when they fall back into old habits. And while Close, too, is a welcome sight, Jamie Demetriou steals the show as her character’s much-younger beau Nigel, a bumbling would-be MI6 agent himself.
Back in Action was directed and co-written by Seth Gordon, who has made some great comedies (Horrible Bosses) and some not-so-great ones (Baywatch, Identity Thief). This one feels especially lazy at the script level but has a few genuine laughs here and there, and the two leads give the film a lot more than it gives back (this is an especially inauspicious return for Diaz, who hasn’t lost a step after a decade off screen), delivering passable small-screen entertainment for viewers with tempered expectations.
