‘Back in Action’ Review: Cameron Diaz Is Finally Back (but She Deserves a Better Movie)

Oh Cameron Diaz, how we missed you — your winning comedic timing, your commitment to every role. Diaz was the MVP of many a film despite, sadly, rarely getting credit for her acting talents before her quiet retirement from the business in 2014. It’s been over a decade since she’s performed in a movie or a TV show, but now she’s finally returned with a Netflix action comedy co-starring Jamie Foxx. And although it’s wonderful to see her back in action in Seth Gordon’s “Back in Action,” the film fails to answer the one very important question the audience will definitely have.

Why?

Why now? Why this film? What was it about this particular project that brought Cameron Diaz back in front of the camera? “Back in Action” has as generic a screenplay as it gets. It’s the same type of cut-and-paste formulaic family adventure you’d find on “The Magical World of Disney” nearly half a century ago, but a lot more expensive and a lot less endearing. It’s for films like “Back in Action” that the word “mediocre” was invented, because it’s not that this film is bad. It’s not interesting or ambitious enough to be bad. It simply “is.” The film’s baseline mainstream competence is almost as exciting as an empty screen.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx star as Emily and Matt, two super-spies on a mission to steal “The Key,” which can digitally manipulate any aspect of the world’s infrastructure. Right before their assignment goes south, she reveals to Matt that she’s pregnant with his child. So when their airplane crashes they take the opportunity to fake their own deaths and live a normal suburban life, raising kids and coaching soccer and selling homemade puzzles on Etsy.

Fifteen years later, Emily and Matt have a sulky teenage daughter named Alice (McKenna Roberts, “Barbie”) and a computer geek son named Leo (Rylan Jackson, “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”), who both think their parents are boring boomers. When they have to rescue 14-year-old Alice from violent adults running a nightclub with drugs and underage drinking — a dark subplot that goes nowhere — they reveal their martial arts mastery and accidentally go viral, finally blowing their cover after a decade-and-a-half.

Soon their old handler, played by Kyle Chandler (a rhyme which is more amusing than most of this movie), arrives to say that The Key is still missing and secret agencies all over the world will stop at nothing to get it back. He’s immediately killed. Their other old handler, played by Andrew Scott (no rhymes there), is extremely super shady and probably evil. If you’ve never seen a movie before you might not be able to guess where that’s all going, but if you have, I’m sorry. Don’t buckle up. It’s not going to be a bumpy night.

You will not be surprised by anything that happens in “Back in Action.” Even the film’s big secret cameo is a beloved actor who these days seems to leave holes in their schedule just in case a streaming service calls with a last-minute gig. Emily and Matt go on the run to retrieve The Key and get their lives back, but they have to bring Alice and Leo with them. They hide that they’re spies for so long that it makes their kids seem weirdly clueless. And yes, eventually those kids will be kidnapped.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s nothing wrong with a formula, so long as that formula is an excuse to deliver something else too. A formula is a skeleton, and the style, the humor, the message, the personality, or the chemistry, these are all the meat that can hang off of it. Without anything to deliver, even a tried-and-true formula will fail as a delivery system. “Back in Action” is an idea for a movie that happens to be nearly two hours long (with an eleven-minute credits sequence – yes, that’s right, eleven minutes). It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

Even this film’s MacGuffin doesn’t MacGuff very well. The Key is a very important thingy and they need to get it. Great. You didn’t even have to tell us what it did, “Back in Action,” but now that you have — and now that you’ve failed to sufficiently distract us — we have lots of time to think about it. You’re telling us that a device which can circumnavigate the digital security of any computer system in the world fifteen years ago is still effective? Nothing about computers has changed, at all, since the first iPad came out? We solved Y2K with nary a hitch but in 15 years of knowing a universal computer key was out there somewhere and bad guys were looking for it, nobody came out with a security patch? I know our trust in government is at an all-time low but sheesh, at least give their I.T. department some credit.

What “Back in Action” has that no other movie has had in more than a decade is, you guessed it, Cameron Diaz. It’s the exact kind of film that she’s easily elevated time and again, and she is just as charming today as she was when the otherwise forgettable “Sex Tape” came out. If you missed her, good news! She’s back, and that’s very nice. Now does anyone have a movie that actually deserves her?