Summary
Back in Action hardly seems like a worthwhile comeback vehicle for Cameron Diaz, who returns to the screen in a deeply cynical and soulless action-comedy that should have stayed on the shelf.
You have to wonder how much money Cameron Diaz was offered for Back in Action. It was evidently enough to coax her out of retirement, but at what real cost? Her return vehicle is a formulaic, tired, and utterly soulless Netflix actioner that has rightly been sat on a shelf for two years, where if the world was just, it would have stayed.
There’s nothing wrong with a genre movie, of course, but this isn’t just an overly familiar paint-by-numbers action-comedy. It’s an aggressively dreary and bizarrely lifeless endeavor that doesn’t look or sound real for a single, fleeting moment; the script, ostensibly co-written by director Seth Gordon and Brendan O’Brien, has the ring of something ChatGPT might vomit back from a confused prompt, and almost none of the scenes looks like they were filmed anywhere other than a studio lot with a great deal of computerized assistance.
A wish fulfilment fantasy for forty-something parents with recalcitrant teenage children, Back in Action finds Diaz as Emily and Jamie Foxx (They Cloned Tyrone) as Matt, two uber-cool and competent CIA agents who’re introduced smoothly infiltrating the birthday party of a terrorist’s son to retrieve a MacGuffin that can magically control every computer system imaginable. But the main plot takes place fifteen years later, with Emily and Matt having reinvented themselves as dorky suburban parents to teens Alice (McKenna Roberts, who played the young Rue in Euphoria) and Leo (Rylan Jackson, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves).
Before long, Matt and Emily have gone a little too far in retrieving Alice, who seemingly hates Emily, from a nightclub she has snuck to with her older, moustachioed boyfriend. The publicity brings their old handler Chuck (Kyle Chandler, Slumberland) to their door, followed swiftly by unidentified agents still on the lookout for that magical computer device, which Matt hid years prior on the grounds of his mother-in-law’s sprawling English estate. Ginny (Glenn Close, meme’d to death after that nappy scene in The Deliverance), Emily’s mother, is another globetrotting spy with a much younger boyfriend, Nigel (Jamie Demetriou, The Afterparty), and Emily is so enduringly resentful of her lifelong careerism that she told her own children their grandmother was dead.
Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx in Back in Action | Image via Netflix
The essential contradiction of Back in Action is that it wants us to buy into the ridiculous notion that Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are clueless out-of-touch Boomer dorks while also building a movie around how timelessly cool and awesome they are. This manifests in a few ways, from action scenes being almost exclusively scored to classic American pop hits, to multiple characters commenting on how attractive both leads are. Andrew Scott (Ripley) shows up in an inspired bit of stunt casting – he’s primarily known in the U.K. for playing an incredibly sexy character in Fleabag – as an MI6 agent named Baron whose only function is to hopelessly pine over Emily.
This would be forgiven if the usual played-out genre mechanics were decent, but they’re merely serviceable – and that’s at best. The enduring theme of motherhood – Emily resents her own absentee mother; Alice resents Emily – is explored in the most rote way possible and builds to the most predictable conclusion. The action is blandly choreographed and unconvincingly presented. The one-liners are forced and unfunny. The insights about parenting and bland suburban normality are toothless.
The only surprising bright spot is Nigel, a character so ridiculous he almost seems like a transplant from a better, funnier movie. He fancies himself a spy in training and becomes a kind of ad hoc babysitter/wannabe grandfather in a string of ridiculous scenes that nonetheless have an energy and an authentic sense of humor that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.
I’m just not buying it. Despite the years that have elapsed since her last on-screen role, Cameron Diaz is the furthest thing from the frumpy soccer mom she’s forced to cosplay here – she’s Cameron Diaz, for crying out loud – and an ageless Jamie Foxx is hipper than most of the young characters. There’s an underlying algorithmic quality to the whole thing that just feels deeply cynical to me; it’s asking us to buy ideas we never would and put up with lazy, milquetoast tripe like obedient little consumers. Even if that’s what we fundamentally are to a platform like Netflix, it’s best not to be reminded of it.
