Back in Action is a great example of how it’s not what a movie’s about, it’s how it’s about it. What it’s about? Not great. Mum and Dad were spies in another life. We’ve seen that movie before. How it’s about it? Back in Action is funny, it’s exciting, and it ticks all the boxes for Netflix’s first high-profile release of 2025.

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The “funny” part is key, as that can lead you through even the most retrodden material. It’s fair to say Jamie Foxx has been “in action” this whole time, but the title truly applies to his co-star Cameron Diaz, now in her early 50s and not in as many prominent roles as she once was. Not only do these spies turned ordinary punters have a tonne of chemistry, but that chemistry makes us laugh. Tellingly, these aren’t one-liners dropped after they’ve just dropped another henchman, something they do regularly throughout Back in Action (using exclusively non-lethal force, which adds to the good time). No, they derive from 15 years of packing school lunches and coaching soccer teams, after 15 years of exclusively dropping henchmen.

Matt and Emily were on what turned out to be their final mission when things went pear shaped. The deep cover CIA operatives had been embedded together on said mission when they started to be in bed together as well. It was only a few moments after she revealed her pregnancy to him, and he responded with exactly the words any woman would want to hear in that situation, that foes on the private jet carrying them tried to take them out. No one should have known they were there, suggesting someone close to them wanted them dead. Turning the tables meant the plane was without a pilot, and Matt and Emily parachuted to safety, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

Changing names and identities, Matt and Emily resurface in the suburbs, and the baby girl in Emily’s stomach, now a 14-year-old named Alice (McKenna Roberts), has been followed by a 12-year-old brother, Leo (Rylan Jackson). They of course have no awareness of their parents’ particular set of skills, only rolling their eyes at them as teenagers do. But Matt and Emily’s old life becomes their new one again when they snap at a club where Alice entered as a minor, having never given up the knack for surveillance and followed her there. The video of them beating up a bunch of douchebags goes viral, and their cover is definitively blown.

That means old adversaries want to know the whereabouts of “the key,” the MacGuffin on their “final” mission, which Matt surreptitiously snagged as future leverage. Both friend and foe will be in touch, and will sometimes be confused for one another, as the family flees to England and the kids start to get an idea maybe their parents didn’t just take a few taekwondo classes in the Peace Corps in South America, where they also allegedly learned to speak Russian.

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It’s hard to overstate how much Back in Action feels like any other streamer release from the past few years on the surface, and then how much it distinguishes itself in the details. Having a comedy vet like Seth Gordon at the helm and at the pen is certainly part of that. This at times feels like an earlier output from Netflix stooge McG, when that output was always good – and when it frequently involved Cameron Diaz, star of two of McG’s Charlie’s Angels movies. Except the current version of McG is capable of no better than last year’s Uglies, and Back in Action is miles more accomplished and more fun.

The stunts and fight scenes are really good – you would swear it’s actually those 50-something actors doing most of it – but the main point of distinction is just how good they are in their regular repartee. Foxx has not looked this comfortable on screen in years, and this manifests itself in casual wordplay that produces out-loud laughter. As just one example, when Matt catches Emily involved in a suspicious activity on their daughter’s computer and Emily says it’s nothing, his response “Don’t look like nothing” comes out in such a hilarious blur of words that it perfectly captures both his easy manner and his knack for finding humour in any situation. Lest we forget, Diaz is also an accomplished comedy veteran, as she also shows a glimpse of her glory years with how easily she slips back into this mode, playing a fun mum with a chip on her shoulder.

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To further burnish the film’s credentials, it gets supporting work from actors who might ordinarily seem above such material. Playing one of those friends or possibly foes, Andrew Scott has burst on the scene in the past few years with his work in All of Us Strangers and Ripley, and it shouldn’t seem like he needs to settle for a movie like Back in Action. Fortunately, he’s not settling. Ditto Glenn Close, who has had her own renaissance in recent years and plays Emily’s British mum, also once a spy and of course a neglectful mother to Emily. Finally you have Jamie Demetriou as Close’s current lover, who bumbles in humorous ways and quickly adopts the unwanted grandfather role to their children, even though he’s 15 years younger than Diaz and 20 years younger than Foxx.

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You can breathlessly praise a movie like Back in Action while still recognising its limitations. This is still an action comedy directly out of the mould that streamers have found their best bet of capturing whatever their data tells them audiences will like. But this movie disarms any instincts toward cynicism with its clean construction and constant sense of fun. A movie can be about anything as long as it’s about it as well as Back in Action is.

 

Back in Action is currently streaming on Netflix.

7 / 10