Movie Review: 'Back in Action' is Dreary and Derivative Netflix Dreck

Back in Action

Directed by Seth Gordon

Written by Seth Gordon, Brendan O’Brien

Starring Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Glenn Close

Release Date January 17th, 2025

Published January 21st, 2025

Back in Action stars Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as Emily and Matt, CIA partners who fall in love while working on an op. Naturally, this op goes sideways and the two end up nearly dying. This puts a scare into them both as Emily is pregnant. With their colleagues and enemies assuming that they are dead, the two use the opportunity to disappear and start a new life in the suburbs, raising kids, getting jobs, and pursuing hobbies like normal, everyday Americans.

This actually works out for a surprisingly long while, especially in the social media and surveillance era, no one stumbles over them still being alive for more than 15 years. Unfortunately, with their 15 year old daughter, Alice (McKenna Roberts), acting out and finding trouble in a nightclub, mom and dad’s CIA skills come into play and he couple are caught on camera beating up leering creeps in a video that ends up going viral.

It’s less than 24 hours later that they are found. A former colleague, Chuck (Kyle Chandler), tracks them down and is immediately killed by vaguely Russian baddies. This forces Matt and Emily to grab their kids, Alice and her little brother, Leo (Rylan Jackson), and flee the country. When they initially went on the run, Matt stashed an important McGuffin in London, in the home of Emily’s estranged mother, Ginny (Glenn Close), herself a spy for M.I 6.

Thus, they must flee to London while evading terrorists and their former friends, including Baron (Andrew Scott), a by the book MI6 spy with a long unrequited crush on Emily. He spots them immediately and is after them but is he just doing his job, chasing a pair of CIA Agents suspiciously sneaking into England, or is he, perhaps, working with the terrorists. You’ll need to see Back in Action to find out, the movie isn’t quite bad enough for me to spoil it outright.

I will say that the answer to who's the real baddie behind the attacks on Emily and Matt is deeply uninspired, but then, that goes for most of Back in Action. Despite the solid casting of Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, providing some surprisingly sparky chemistry, Back in Action is far too rote, predictable, and derivative for the star power to overcome it. The best I can say is that Diaz and Foxx keep the movie from being boring, but that’s the kindest thing I can say.

Back in Action was directed and co-written by Seth Gordon who, thankfully, decided to leave the gross out, lowbrow humor of his dreary Baywatch adaptation behind. That said, it’s hard to say he’s gotten much better. Gordon has merely gone from putrid to desperately mediocre and derivative. Back in Action looks good, it has the trappings of a big budget action movie, but the action is deeply uninspired.

The script for Back in Action has likely existed since the early 1980s. Every few years someone blew the dust off of it and updated the technology involved, and left the story fully intact. The beats of the screenplay are like a song you’ve heard way too many times before. The rote action scenes feel like they were crafted specifically around brands that could easily be integrated based on the highest bids from bottled water companies to luxury cars.

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