Look how mild-mannered he is — international super-spy Jackie Chan wins over his neighbours kids in the Kindergarten Cop-esque The Spy Next Door.
There are already more than enough movies about spies, cops, hit men, bounty hunters and ace criminals pulling one last job before they retire, but The Spy Next Door is one of the few where the character is actually at retirement age. At 55, it’s only natural that Jackie Chan’s movies don’t have the same mind-boggling action choreography that he brought to his early Hong Kong flicks, and the stunts and action sequences in Spy are at least good enough for a film aimed at eight-year-olds. Anyone older than that will be stretching to find anything worthwhile, though.
The appropriately minimal plot finds Chan babysitting the children of his next-door neighbour, who he’s trying to woo in his mild-mannered pen salesman alter ego. Naturally, Chan’s character is likable yet bumbling, unable to do even the most basic household tasks until he brings in some hi-tech spy gadgetry — apparently cooking breakfast is easier with a high-powered flamethrower than with a frying pan. A few questionable bits of advice aside (no one should ever encourage anyone to pop their collars, ever), the family comedy half of Spy is pretty tolerable. Chan doesn’t have much in the way of comic timing, but he’s likable enough, and his awkwardness is a nice respite from the alternately precocious and sullen kids.
Outside of the home environment, the story has Chan’s last arrest before retirement (a Boris Badenov-type Russian played with hammy gusto by Magnús Scheving) escaping custody and tracking down the would-be stepdad. This leads to some decent (for a kids’ movie) action, with Chan showing his usual flair for incorporating an assortment of props into the battle. No one’s going to mistake this for Rumble in the Bronx — it’s closer to Suburban Commando, and will be forgotten just as easily in a few years’ time — but Chan hasn’t lost all of his old magic yet.
The most revealing part of Spy is its end credits. It’s a longstanding Chan tradition to include outtakes while the credits crawl, but instead of death-defying leaps and bone-shattering falls, the bloopers in his latest mostly consist of Chan flubbing his lines or fumbling with a chair. Granted, he has a good two decades on his most obvious action successor, Thai sensation Tony Jaa, and no one’s expecting Chan to go through an Ong Bak-style ordeal when he makes a movie. But rather than peter away with Kindergarten Cop-level family comedies, maybe Chan should follow his character’s lead and consider an early retirement.
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