Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs
The hottest movie on Netflix right now is Back in Action. It’s that one where Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx play spies who have retired to a quiet domestic life, only to get pulled back into espionage, creating a humorous contrast between normal suburban life and the big-ticket action-movie adventures that ensue. This is not to be confused with the Apple original Ghosted, where regular guy Chris Evans is drawn into a secret world of espionage involving his new girlfriend Ana de Armas; or Amazon’s Role Play, where secret assassin Kaley Cuoco balances her secret missions with her family life; or any of the other streaming movies that are basically slightly more grown-up versions of Spy Kids (including the actual Spy Kids movie Netflix made a few years ago). Or, to name another one, Keeping Up with the Joneses, where a normal suburban couple played by Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher are swept up into an espionage plot thanks to their undercover neighbors, played by Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot.
Doesn’t that last one sound plausible? It should, because it’s an actual movie that exists and is now streaming on Max; and also shouldn’t, because it predates this streaming trend (really, several of the streaming services themselves) by several years. Keeping Up with a Joneses is a 2016 action-comedy, an absolute box office disaster upon its initial release, now enjoying some Max chart success, presumably at least in part due to people mistaking it for movies like Back in Action. Which it is, sort of, except for the distinction that it is quite good.
Movies like Back in Action have their moments, sometimes. They ought to, with experienced stars like Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx on hand. But Keeping Up with the Joneses achieves what very few streaming action-comedies have managed: It is a well-constructed, well-made, consistently amusing piece of entertainment. For whatever reason, it wasn’t recognized as such back in 2016. Amazingly, the premise may have seemed a little corny nearly a decade ago, despite the fact that it’s become a Hollywood go-to: Jeff (Galifianakis) and Karen (Fisher) are a long-married couple so accustomed to their routine that when they have several weeks to themselves with their kids at summer camp, the best they can think to do is watch DVR’d episodes of The Good Wife. They’re drawn to more glamorous new neighbors Tim (Hamm) and Natalie (Gadot), who Karen, out of seeming boredom, comes to suspect are hiding something. They are: The Joneses are a real couple, but their jobs, suburban home, and neighborliness are a cover for a top-secret operation.
It probably seems easy enough to write most of the jokes from there: Galifianakis bumbles his way through some shoot-outs with non sequiturs, maybe Fisher screams or falls down, while Hamm and Gadot grow irritated. But in the hands of director Greg Mottola, all four leads have a casually funny, character-based chemistry, and even the silliest moments (Tim and Jeff bonding over “snake wine”; Karen getting hit with a knockout dart while sneaking around the Joneses’ home) feel true to who they are, not entirely driven by a minimum antics requirement.
Part of this, I think, is because the movie clearly seems designed as a comedy-first enterprise. A lot of streaming-action comedies dart back and forth between the two genres so frantically that the jokes sound like half-assed improv and the action looks like half-assed animatics. Joneses, however, takes care to let each of its four major players, all ill-served by movies at various points in their careers, find what’s funny about their specific characters. This is particularly noticeable with Fisher, who could have been a screwball queen in another era: She plays Karen’s panicky side as a kind of frazzled excitability; you can’t tell if she’s using her suburban-mom façade to suppress her id, or if this is her way of expressing it. (She’s a master of screaming, in particular: She screams her lines just infrequently enough to get a jolting laugh out of it multiple times.) Just as funny, in its own way, is the offhand, more deadpan banter between Hamm and Gadot, balancing ruthless professionalism with the humanity just beneath their physically impressive surfaces. It makes such a difference in a movie where you’re supposed to see that funny contrast between stylized slickness and bumbling “reality,” which the streaming equivalents have blurred into a kind of sameness. Joneses pays attention to human details, rather than CG gunk; Mottola doesn’t seem like he’s performing an incompetent audition to direct a Tom Cruise movie.
This makes it all the more gratifying (and just plain shaming for a movie like Back in Action) that Mottola’s movie nevertheless looks better than a lot of “real” action movies. It was shot on actual celluloid, which was less unusual in 2016 but still not the norm, and you can absolutely tell: The colors and grain give it a warmer, less sitcom-lit look in both its suburban sequences and moodier night-set spycraft scenes. When there are action sequences, particularly a shoot-out/car chase around the midway point, they’re actually pretty well-staged for clarity and pacing, without forgetting the jokes. (As their car zooms through a puddle with henchmen’s guns blazing behind them, Fisher screams in displeasure that she’s getting wet.)
Look, Keeping Up with the Joneses isn’t a great movie. Mottola himself has made better ones like Superbad (a masterpiece within its aims), Adventureland (lovely), The Daytrippers (delightful), and his recent Hamm reunion Confess, Fletch (deserves many sequels). But after so many mediocre-or-worse action comedies about celebrities pretending to be spies pretending to be suburbanites, it looks increasingly rock solid. Maybe next time a streamer has the impulse to hand $100 million over to a movie where, say, Chris Pine and Rachel McAdams have to shoot people during marriage counseling or something, they could just hand some of that money over to Greg Mottola instead, and reasonably expect a comedy that also looks like a real movie.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&appId=823934954307605&version=v2.8”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));
