Steve on TV: Diaz and Foxx get ‘Back in Action’ but play it too safe 

Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.

::

The generic title Back in Action has a couple of offscreen references more interesting than the movie itself. The assembly-line Netflix comedy caper marks the return of Cameron Diaz after a decade’s withdrawal from acting. It’s also the comeback of co-star Jamie Foxx after he was sidelined by a brain bleed in Atlanta while shooting the movie. (For more on that, check out Foxx’s concert show, also on Netflix, Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was …) 

Ever since she made her feature debut opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask, Diaz has been in some great movies (going drab in Being John Malkovich, stealing thunder from Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, holding her own against hair gel in There’s Something About Mary) and not-so-great ones that still made a cultural mark (Shrek, Bad Teacher, Gangs of New York). Foxx’s career has also been a storied one, not only for his Oscar-winning turn in Ray but opposite Tom Cruise in Michael Mann’s Collateral and in big films like Django Unchained and Dreamgirls. 

That’s a long-winded way of saying, Gosh, these two deserve to pair up in a great movie. But if you saw the last time they were teamed — in the musical Annie, a remake misguided enough to justify Diaz’s 10-year withdrawal from the business — you know it’s not an automatically magical union. 

Here, Foxx and Diaz play Matt and Emily, two CIA spies who have formed a personal bond outside their assignments. We meet them entering a posh European mansion, searching in the monied crowd for a known terrorist — a familiar gloss on dozens of similar situations from Mission: Impossible movies of Foxx’s old co-star, Cruise. Once they nab the MacGuffin, an ICS key that can control the Whole Entire World’s Whatsits, the duo barely survive a messy extraction. It involves a plummeting plane that skis down an Alpine slope, an avalanche, a parachute and a lot of unconvincing computer effects, all a dim echo of James Bond films past.

Presumed dead by their bosses and spurred by a positive home pregnancy test, Emily and Matt remake themselves as the average couple next door. Here’s where the Atlanta-area filming kicks in. It’s 15 years later, and they have a mildly rebellious 14-year-old daughter, Alice (McKenna Roberts) and nerdy 12-year-old son, Leo (Rylan Jackson). When the girl lies to her folks for a night out downtown, a viral video of Matt and Emily trouncing some leering older guys at a nightclub draws the attention of their former CIA handler (Kyle Chandler). He shows up to warn them All the Bad Guys of the World now know they’re alive. And they think the couple have the ICS key. 

Cue the destruction of the idyllic Atlanta neighborhood where they live via minivan speeding through neighbors’ yards and way too many machine guns ablaze. From there, Back in Action shifts the family to the U.K., where Emily’s estranged mom Ginny lives. She’s played, with a British accent, by Glenn Close, living in a country estate called Foxhound Manor. That’s an example of how woefully on-the-nose the movie is with its details and dialogue. Naturally, Ginny is an agent of Britain’s CIA equivalent, MI6, so she has the skills to fight back when goons invade her luxurious country kitchen. 

You can probably guess how the rest of the movie plays out. If the Action part of the title refers to all the CG- and stunt person-enhanced fight scenes that pepper the plot, the emphasis is just as much on the Back. There’s nothing here you haven’t already seen in flicks like this from way back when. It’s an algorithm-friendly purée of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the overkill, shoot-em-up Pitt-Jolie movie, not the superior Prime Glover-Erskine series), True Lies and Spy Kids. In a musical choice that surprises nobody, director and co-writer Seth Gordon scores his fight scenes to oldies: Etta James (“At Last”), James Brown (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”) and Dean Martin (“Ain’t That a Kick in the Head”). This trope is so old-hat, you can call it post-ironic. Everybody involved deserves better, especially the viewers. 

::

PEACOCK: The Day of the Jackal

If Back in Action gives you a taste for twisty, scenic European thrills done the right way, you can’t get much better than the 10-episode series The Day of the Jackal. There’s no connection to Atlanta or our film industry, but it’s full of the kinds of surprises — including a couple of real shockers — that Back in Action needs more of. The only problem is, you have to be a Peacock subscriber to watch it. 

Eddie Redmayne plays the eponymous Jackal, a man of many passports and pseudonyms who roams the globe as a hired hand, killing people for very high fees. His first target is a German politician, and the hit seems to go badly, one of the first examples of the 10-episode series shrewdly wrong-footing us. Like its steely-minded antihero, the show is usually multiple steps ahead of us. 

Though he’s ready to retire to his Spanish estate with unknowing young wife Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and their young son, the Jackal takes one last lucrative job. Meanwhile, he’s being tracked by an eager MI6 analyst, Bianca (Lashana Lynch), whose own home life is offered to us as a parallel/contrast to the Jackal’s … but there’s no comparison. Redmayne has the cool, intelligent charisma to make us forget that his character is a serial killer; the show puts us on as slippery a moral slope as Silence of the Lambs did, when we found ourselves rooting for Hannibal Lecter.

Anyway, for his latest and most difficult job, the Jackal has to kill an egotistical young billionaire (Khalid Abdalla), whose plan to expose the financial holdings of all the richest people in the world has the rest of that 1% feeling murderous. I’ll leave it there. 

::

NETFLIX: American Primeval 

If tales of billionaires running the globe hits a little too close for you right now, you might prefer to turn to the dirty pleasures of the horror genre. Actually, the six-episode series American Primeval doesn’t bill itself as horror but as frontier drama. Don’t kid yourself. Created by Mark L. Smith, the oh-so-seriously macho writer of the Leonardo DiCaprio film The Revenant, Primeval is close to a long-form snuff film. Just about everybody dies in this thing — by scalping, arrows, fire, hanging — you name it. The handful of people who survive are pretty much the ones you wish hadn’t. 

Loosely based on a bloody bit of Western history, the story centers on a woman named Sara (Betty Gilpin of GLOW, stiff in the period setting) traveling the western territory with her son Devin (Preston Mota) and trying to reunite with her husband. Problem is, they’re smack in the middle of a bloody turf battle among the U.S. military, Mormon settlers and Native Americans. Their stoic, surly guide Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) is constantly having to save mother and child from scrapes caused by their own stupidity. And around them, everybody dies while spouting stilted, old-timey dialogue. 

Oh, well. The year is still young. Here’s to hoping we see better stuff in the coming months. 

::

Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.