‘Back in Action’ Review: Surprise! Mom and Dad are spies

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx probably got a good workout filming the fight scenes “Back in Action,” the latest high-gloss junk from Netflix. Obviously, the actors earned their salary in a way that the person who came up with the title did not.

The film is directed by Seth Gordon (“Horrible Bosses”) and written by Gordon and Brendan O’Brien. spins the wheel of wildly overutilized premises – an action comedy where a married couple who met as spies but are now parents come out of retirement and put their children in danger.

We first encounter Matt (Foxx) and Emily (Diaz) in a pre-suburban prologue when they steal a fancy MacGuffin (“a master key to some of the world’s most critical infrastructure”) from an Eastern European terrorist. On their escape plane, Emily has no sooner told Matt that she is pregnant than the crew members reveal that they are working for the bad guys.

A staged skirmish breaks out – as Dean Martin croons “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” on the soundtrack, the pilot’s accidental death is treated as a sight gag – but somehow Emily and Matt part ways, a maneuver that requires fewer turns than any self-respecting “Mission: Impossible” entry would have settled for. The couple who are believed to have died in the plane crash now have the opportunity to drop their careers as secret agents.

Flash forward a decade and a half, and they’re raising a 14-year-old, Alice (McKenna Roberts), who hates them, and a 12-year-old, Leo (Rylan Jackson), who’s marginally more compliant and a huge tech geek. When Matt and Emily violently pick up underage Alice from a nightclub, footage of them goes viral (“boomers wreck dance party”) and blows their cover. Soon, their awakened enemies force them to defect to Britain, where a slimy agent (Andrew Scott) is ready to pounce, and Emily will be forced to make amends with her estranged mother, Ginny, also a retired operator . The reveal of the actress playing Ginny warranted a more eccentric surprise than Glenn Close.

With characters who seem designed as placeholders for a future franchise rather than necessities in this one (comedian Jamie Demetriou pops up as Ginny’s sheepish intern), “Back in Action” has a better cast than its (often mawkish) writing servant. For the most part, familiarity takes its toll. A car chase in the wrong direction is far from “To Live and Die in LA”, despite the choice to add a grenade made of Diet Coke and Mentos. And somehow after taking a leap into the Thames, Alice and Leo are completely dry for rescue. Apparently the person who coined the title wasn’t the only one who couldn’t be bothered.

Back in action
Rated PG-13. Snooping parents, disobedient children. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Netflix.