Back in Action on Netflix is a new low for Hollywood creativity
Share:
Cameron Diaz’s dismal new movie with Jamie Foxx – and Diaz’s first film in more than a decade – is proof that style and craft have completely dropped out of a particular kind of action comedy, writes Adam White. Remember when even the most conventional of blockbusters used to be made with care?.
It is funny that in the same week that the Oscar-tipped epic The Brutalist was engulfed in a controversy about its (relatively minor) use of AI, audiences were presented with the first entirely AI-generated movie! Or at least what you imagine an entirely AI-generated movie would be: Netflix’s shiny, sterile Back in Action, a film so dismayingly soulless that it could mark a new low in Hollywood creativity.
Why Cameron Diaz chose this to be her first film in a decade is just one of the many mysteries kicked up by Back in Action, which is currently sitting atop Netflix’s Top 10 list. Others include: “When did Andrew Scott forget how to act?”; “What karmic debt does Glenn Close owe Netflix on the heels of this, The Deliverance and Hillbilly Elegy?”; and “What is the rate of return for a straight-to-streaming blockbuster that rented out the Tate Modern for an action setpiece, then staged a combined speedboat and motorbike chase along the Thames?”.
Mainly, though, you’re left wondering why any real sense of style or creative vigour has dropped out of films like these, with their devotion to standard action genre plot tropes and faint duplication of older, better movies. Back in Action casts Diaz and Jamie Foxx as a spy couple who unexpectedly get pregnant and decide to go off-grid, only for their past to catch up with them – and their clueless-to-their-parents’-old-jobs children – 15 years later. A rotation of nondescript bad guys wants hold of “The Key”, a MacGuffin of such criminal vagueness that it may as well have been called “The Object” or “The Thingamajig”. See, in the wrong hands The Key can drain entire city blocks of power, and only Foxx’s character knows where The Key is hidden.
