The Spy Next Door (2010)
Part spy, part babysitter, all hero.
Can’t stop won’t stop. Last week was a family fun romp that perhaps had a few jokes some might find a bit much for kids. This week we have one that’s so brain-dead family friendly it might hurt to watch! Throw out what you think of kid actors, throw out the number of injury b-roll you collected over filming - Jackie Chan want’s everyone to tune in, for better or worse. Tonight, we look at The Spy Next Door.
You may have noticed I seem to be firing right off on this one - and I feel that’s only fair. I’m not sure what it was particularly about this one but dang. I’ll be honest - as a whole it’s pretty harmless family movie normalcy. Sometimes though, it’s just so bland wheat flavored it make me feel like I’m a hundred years old and farting dust as I chase the whippersnappers of my lawn - and it’s not that old a movie at the time of this being written. So keep in mind no matter how harsh I might sound at times, it’s really not that bad - I’m just pre-exhausted going in and the generic family fun quirk of the movie ran circles around me.
The story is a classic for family movies - take a normal situation, but with the twist of at least one member being something different. Kindergarten Cop, Suburban Commando, this movie - it’s all that kind of spoofy normal not normal groove. Here, we take that other thing that’s normally pretty popular - spy movies - and we make the fish out of water a spy! He’s just a dude that’s retiring and wants to be part of a family, but of course his spy life needs to come back and fight him and get the family involved! It’s a family movie, you never think the family is going to end up dead, at worst you wonder if perhaps the spy will end up with a happy ending or not. That said, the spy movie story takes a backseat to most the movie, providing instead a backdrop for the spy vs kids family segment that takes up the bulk of the movie, being book-ended by the actual spy action.
So hows the acting here? I think you may already have an inkling, but it’s a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s typical family flick cheese, and a few times it’s kinda not great. I’ll be real, some of the worst acting comes from the kids, but the cheesiest stuff is almost always the bad guys. There are a few moments in there where it’s a very nicely delivered, perhaps even touching part but at best I’d wager it all balances out to alright. The cheese is intentional I’m sure, although the less stellar kid parts probably not nearly as intentional, but especially with the youngest kid you’ll get what you get really.
Need to dress for the job.
Audio is balanced well. Yeah, it might be delivered with a goofy accent or something, but you’ll still hear it fine. The audio to accompany all of it is what you’d expect, but to further enforce that statement none of it stuck around with me afterwards. There’s a bunch of comedy in this as well, but unlike the normal family movie, it doesn’t go for most the low hanging fruit that would make for audio comedy. Yep, that’s right, there’s no fart jokes in there, much to my surprise. That said, there is the whole bad or goofy accents thing, and I guess you could consider that to be comedy. A lot of the other comedy is slapstick oriented, but there’s a few actual jokes including a knock knock joke.
Effects department does have some things to do here, and it’s not all action oriented. There’s plenty of costumes, some played for comedic purposes, like the head bad constantly getting outfits that don’t blend in after getting out of prison. Some parts of outfits also become props, like the belt-staff, or fancy spy watch. There’s plenty of classic Chan-style action scenes, involving ladders, pans, chairs, and plenty of flips and the likes. Of course, being a family movie, you won’t find a ton of blood or anything of that sort, but the action is still there for at least a few scenes to draw you in. Probably the fanciest costume is the youngest kids cyborg Halloween costume, but that’s less a knock against the department and more just a comment of it’s a pretty cool costume.
So it doesn’t really sound all that bad right? Well, it really isn’t all that bad. Something about it just really wasn’t catching me while i was watching it. That said, the other big part of the family flicks is teaching morals - and this one isn’t any different. One kid doubles down on the main moral - that about how lying is bad and can have consequences. There’s also a jog over from the older daughter about family being more than just blood relations. If that’s not enough, of course there’s also the whole spy story where Russians are trying to make a magic chemical to eat all of the worlds oil except for Russia’s. Alright, so that one perhaps doesn’t really have such a moral to it, but I’m sure you could wring a “don’t try to rule the world” or “greed is bad” out of it if you wanted.
A challenger has appeared!
It’s not a bad movie, but it’s not the best movie out there either. If you really need a family friendly movie, you could probably settle for this one. It’s not super heavy on the Jackie Chan action that a person might be looking for, but it’s pretty normal family movie. It wasn’t particularly grabbing my attention while watching it, but I went in to it rather tired as well, so perhaps the movie was already at a disadvantage when I started watching it. It’s relatively harmless, has a few jokes that will be hit or miss, some slapstick and goofy accents, and honestly gives you what the title says.