REVIEW: ‘The Spy Next Door’

As we were walking out of the screening of “The Spy Next Door”, I heard the woman next to me say, “You know, that was much better that I expected.”

That lady must have had some really low expectations – crazy low expectations.

Now, the story is that Bob Ho (Jackie Chan) has just caught his old nemesis (played by Magnus Scheving, who has a very bad Russian accent through only half of the movie) and is now going to retire so he can have a normal life with Gillian (Amber Valetta).  Gillian is a single mother of three kids, Farren (Madoline Carrol), Ian (Will Shadley) and Nora (Alina Foley), and the kids hate Bob’s guts. Then, we find out that Gillian’s father broke his hip (while playing softball), and she has to go to Colorado to take care of him.  Bob agrees to take care of the kids while she’s gone. Now, somehow, Ian (a ten-year-old) gets onto Bob’s computer, where Bob has some top-secret-super-spy-encrpto-files, and downloads them to his iPod. So the bad guys, of course, come after the children.

This movie has so many plot holes and contradicting scenes that it is insane, and it looked like someone badly spliced a very bad children’s movie and an action movie that they filmed with their seven-year-old in the backyard.  The kids can’t seem to make up their minds about Bob. In one scene, they are all angry and hating his guts, and then in the next scene they are all cozy and happy and trusting, and then in the next scene they hate him even more than they did in the first! Bob also seems to alternate between a cheesy-poof who doesn’t know the first thing about anything and a pretty smart guy who any kid would fall in love with immediately.

Yeah... this really is the best part: the poster.

The acting was so poor that it’s difficult to describe without using inappropriate language.  Everyone seems pretty accepting about thefact that their neighbor is a spy. The mother’s reactions are completely and utterly out of proportion. She doesn’t seem to care that her children ran away to go with Bob on his super secret spy stuff, but she is very angry when Farren tries to leave the house wearing a miniskirt.

Now here is something you should never have to say about any action movie: the action scenes put me to sleep. I’m not joking. Ask my dad, he’ll tell you, I fell asleep several times throughout that movie. Shouldn’t action sequences be exciting, vivid, attention-grabbing, enough to shake you out of your morning stupor and perk you up, not lull you to sleep?

There are some memorable lines, I suppose. I can’t think of any right off the top of my head, but I’m sure they’re there somewhere. Even if they are there, though, they couldn’t possibly be enough to save this movie. There were also some really cute and funny moments hidden throughout, but my favorite part was the outtakes at the end (which all Jackie Chan movies have). That is the earmark of a truly bad movie when the outtakes are the best part.

I believe that this movie is the ultimate proof of why kid’s movies and actions movies should never ever mix together unless you are really confident that you are good at it. And if you are good at it, don’t do it anyway. Please. For the health and sanity of our children, just don’t.