Back In Action (2025) Nobody's complaining about seeing beloved fan favorites Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx return to entertaining us....
Who didn't miss Diaz, always a cinematic firecracker, while she took a 10 year hiatus from films......face it, we all did.
And it's certainly a relief to see Foxx back with us, after suffering through alarming health scares.
That's the good news. That they're back and starring in a spiffy, expensive Netflix action-comedy.
Here's the bad news - that spiffy expensive Netflix action-comedy is just another one of those mechanically assembled, A.I. generated Frankenstein-ian concoctions.....pieced together by those notorious Netflix algorithms that are permanently programmed to imitate 1990's popcorn blockbusters.
For these two stars, couldn't Netflix come up with something better than reheated tropes from all those Schwarzenegger-Stallone-Gibson-Cruise-Willis wingdings?
Pardon us while we let out a long dramatic sigh.....
Here goes...(forgive us if we stop to yawn)....Diaz and Foxx were super-dooper James and Jane Bond spies. We know this from the furiously over-choreographed opening that mimics a pre-title Bond movie sequence.
Years later, they've settled into a typical upper middle class suburban lifestyle, complete with two kids, a surly teen daughter (McKenna Roberts) and perky up-for-anything 12 year old boy (Rylan Jackson).
But as you knew it would, a past mission fires up again and the whole family's off to London for chases, shootouts and a lame, worn out twist or two....(including Glenn Close showing up as the fam's spymaster granny...)
Yada, yada yada.....viewers could connect the plot's dots blindfolded.
The only thing that stood out for us was the casting of gifted actor Andrew Scott (Netflix's "Ripley") as a possibly turncoat MI6 operative. What a dumb idea for a red herring twist......even the Netflix A,I. machine knew that Scott had already played an MI6 turncoat in "Spectre". Plus, what a waste of time to give such a versatile actor such a nothing, throwaway role.
We'll admit though, we took a moderate amount of amusement out of this cobbled together test tube baby of a movie....
Cameron Diaz is still a live wire and all kinds of fun to watch and Jamie Foxx more than matches her in charismatic star power.
And since we all may be dead and buried before Barbara Broccoli and Amazon ever come to terms on making another James Bond movie, the spy fights and chases in "Back In Action" served to feed our addiction to Bond-ian adventure.
Our main beef - if Netflix has enough money to throw at these elaborate imitations of previous movies, why not start using real writers to create them? Just a suggestion......
Who knows? Maybe then we'd be able give out a rating higher than the one here....2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).
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