Back in Action | Film Review

 

Former spies Emily (Cameron Diaz) and Matt (Jamie Foxx) are pulled back into the CIA when their secret identities are compromised.

I wasn't really planning to watch this film, mostly because I didn't think I'd enjoy it that much. But after seeing it pop up again and again and again on Netflix, I decided to give it a go.

Thankfully, the film was better than I thought it would be.

Though that's not to say it was great. For a start, a lot of the dialogue felt like a parody - like the film was a spoof making fun of other similarly-themed spy movies. This got better and more believable as the film continued, but at the beginning it just hits the ear wrong.

The action scenes, though, were really well done in the sense that they were really fun, creative and moved the story forward.

Another fun thing about the film was the soundtrack. Not all of the songs completely fit the scenes they were used in, but they were entertaining regardless.

Where the story fell down for me was the characters. The film never makes you care about them, and the only one that I really enjoyed watching was Nigel (Jamie Demetriou) - the introduction to the character was hilarious.

And then there's the plot. This is basically the same as a thousand other action movies where the objective is to recover a key/encrypted USB/other mysterious device. It was convoluted and didn't really work.

But thankfully the film was still entertaining outside of the plot issues.

Overall, this isn't a ground-breaking, original action movie, but for me it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, so I'm glad I watched it.

5/10