Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Back in Action’ on Netflix, a Generic Action-Comedy That Fails to Justify Cameron Diaz’s Unretirement

The title Back in Action (now streaming on Netflix) is functionally self-descriptive on two levels: It’s a return for both of its stars, Cameron Diaz after a decade of retirement from the acting biz, and Jamie Foxx after enduring a stroke in 2023. (Notably, Diaz’s previous movie, 2014’s Annie, also co-starred Foxx.) It also tidily sums up the plot, in which our two leads play retired CIA agents forced back into the spy game after a 15-year spell as boring suburban raisers-of-children. So this must be one hell of a screenplay to lure Diaz – one of the most endearing top-line stars of the late ’90s and 2000s – back to showbiz, right? Um. Well. Heh. Cough cough. About that. 

BACK IN ACTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Before we Get Into It, lemme just say that I’ll try not to use an assortment of raggedy-ass cliches to describe this, even though it would absolutely be in the spirit of the movie. Carrying on, then: 15 YEARS AGO, Emily (Diaz) is preggers. A big pile of pregnancy tests confirm it over and over again, and dad-to-be Matt (Foxx) says he’s “all in” and picks up one of the tests, prompting her to quip “I peed all over these.” This, my friend, is comedy. Please laugh. It feels good. It’s healthy. No? Fine. Sit there and be ill. Maybe next time. Pending parenthood isn’t entirely convenient for these two. They’re partners, CIA spies who’ve been mixing business and pleasure for a while now, and they’re smack in the middle of doing Spy Shit. What kind of Spy Shit? The kind that requires finding and grabbing and fighting over a MacGuffin (some sort of high-tech computer thingy), then surviving a plane crash/avalanche/fall off a cliff/parachute into the wilderness. Whew, right? Quite the opening sequence.

Having a kid gives Emily and Matt the excuse to drop off the grid and go civilian. Now, they have 14-year-old Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her younger brother Leo (Rylan Jackson), a nice house, a minivan, an Etsy business and all the accoutrements of a normal life. Are they happy? Sure, but not everything is rosy. Alice CAN’T EVEN with her mom right now, and Leo is probably in therapy because the screenwriters forgot to give him a personality. The kids don’t know about the CIA stuff, of course, but how long will that lid stay on the boiling pot? Alice and Leo groan when they hear their parents going at it in the other room, but ha ha ha, Emily and Matt just have the gloves and pads on so they can spar. It seems they miss the excitement of traveling the world and kicking ass and nearly dying. It’s just normal.

But, just when they thought they were out, they pull themselves back in. How? Well, when they track Alice to a nightclub where she used a fake ID to get in and drink, they end up in a fight with a pack of burly bouncers, one of whom gets tossed right the eff off a balcony and lands on top of the DJ, because they just effed with the wrong boring suburban family, yo. A viral video of the melee blows their cover, and now everyone is after them: the CIA, MI6, Belarussian creeps, the Cossacks, Attila the Hun, John Wick, Your Mom, everyone. Why? Matt hid the MacGuffin to use as leverage in case this very thing happened. So they grab the kids and go on the run to London, dodging bad guys and explaining things to the kids along the way: we used to be spies, this is the difference between terrorists and mercenaries, this is why we can use fake IDs and you can’t and that doesn’t really make us hypocrites, etc. Chaos reigns!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Didn’t we see a slightly different variation on this plot in Mark Wahlberg vehicle The Family Plan, which I didn’t remember seeing until Back in Action jogged my memory? The Beekeeper, The Equalizer, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Hitman’s Bodyguard and a million other movies have recycled the agent/assassin-tries-to-live-a-normal-life-only-to-have-their-old-life-bite-them-in-the-ass premise, and so so many of them are as fresh as last year’s olive loaf. 

Performance Worth Watching: Glenn Close turns up at the halfway point as Emily’s estranged mother, and her recent brand of eyes-bugging cartoonishness (The Deliverance, Hillbilly Elegy, Brothers, etc.) fits this bit of formulaic ridiculousness perfectly.

Memorable Dialogue: Sample swab of the screenplay’s stabs at clever dialogue: 

Emily: You realize that if I didn’t have superior inner-thigh strength, you’d be dead, right?

Matt: Your inner thighs saved my life.

Sex and Skin: None! Inner thighs, inner schmighs. Ken and Barbie have more legit hormones than these two.

Our Take: As soon as director Seth Gordon (who helmed all-timer documentary The King of Kong before “graduating” to Hollywood junk like Horrible Bosses and Baywatch) needle-drops Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” to cue a sequence in which Diaz and Foxx kick bad guys in the head, one gets the sinking feeling that Back in Action is about to used-car-salesman us some real hacky shit for two hours. The movie – written by Gordon and Brendan O’Brien – offers not a single original idea in its concept or execution. It’s a Netflick down to its bones: Formulaic story, attractive stars given nothing to do, looks really expensive (no numbers have been reported, but I’d guess, based on Netflix expenditures on other crap like Red Notice and The Gray Man, that it tallies to, um, $163.8 million), instantly forgettable. But a lot of people will start watching, lose interest and let it play in the background while they do light doomscrolling or housekeeping, and it’ll end up in the Netflix Top 10. Conspiracy theory: This is the trademark Netflix strategy.

I will say the action sequences are serviceable, and it’s good to see the screenworthy-as-ever Diaz in the game again, if only to remind us to go back and rewatch In Her Shoes or There’s Something About Mary. Beyond that, the film offers us very little of value: The characters are bereft of basic intelligence. It casts the very talented Andrew Scott (of All of Us Strangers) in a supporting role that gives him nothing to do, so he does almost nothing. It fails to cultivate any chemistry between Diaz and Foxx, who exchange bromidic banter as they speed through school zones and chase bad guys along the Thames on motorcycles. You can just see the stretch marks begin to form on Diaz and Foxx’s face as they try to will this junk material to be funny. 

The prime exemplar of Back in Action’s hackiness, though? The product placement is so egregious, Foxx says things like “It’s too early to be drinking DIET COKE” and “Gimme that DIET COKE” and then puts MENTOS in the DIET COKE, the combination of which, the movie would have us believe, can make an SUV fly. This is just a tiresome, time-wasting, watch-checker of a movie that never bothers trying to justify its existence, not to mention justifying luring Diaz off what was surely a very comfy couch. This movie has MENTOS and DIET COKE for brains.

Our Call: SKIP IT hard and fast, assure yourself that Diaz’s next one probably couldn’t be worse, and scratch your action-comedy-romance itch by watching (or rewatching) The Fall Guy instead.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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