‘Back in Action’ Review: Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz Atone for ‘Annie’ in Diverting Netflix Espionage Comedy

The two actors first worked together in Oliver Stone’s 1999 sports drama Any Given Sunday and then again in 2014’s regrettable movie-musical remake, Annie. Diaz had since retired from acting to focus on her family, until Foxx lured her back to work on this project, her first feature in 11 years. Their fizzy chemistry and ease with the characters’ repartee are a welcome reminder of what effortlessly appealing screen performers they are.

The movie is a return of a different kind for Foxx, who was hospitalized in Atlanta near the end of the shoot for an undisclosed medical emergency. He later revealed in his 2023 Netflix special Jamie Foxx: What Happened Was… that he had suffered a life-threatening stroke requiring months of physical therapy to relearn basic motor skills. Fans of both actors should be delighted to see them again, not just bantering but doing most of their own stunts.

The stars’ pedigree also reinforces the ‘90s/aughts vibe of Back in Action, which plays almost like a mashup of True Lies, Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Spy Kids, with a dash of Mission: Impossible. And Diaz in action mode inevitably recalls her ebullient feistiness in the first and best Charlie’s Angels big-screen do-over. Originality is not the strongest suit of the screenplay by director Gordon (who worked with Foxx on Horrible Bosses) and Brendan O’Brien (Neighbors, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates). But the material’s familiarity makes it agreeable comfort food.

Movies like this — starry, frothy, cute, harmless — used to turn up regularly at the multiplex. They now occupy a shrinking part of the landscape in the post-Marvel era, as studios have intensified their focus on high-yield franchises. If this is the streaming universe’s attempt to fill that gap, with marquee talent serving as a distraction from often preposterous plotting and an over-qualified supporting cast to class it up, we could do worse.

Gordon winks at the James Bond model in an action-packed opening sequence that introduces undercover CIA operatives Matt (Foxx) and Emily (Diaz) 15 years earlier, not long into their romantic relationship, just as Emily discovers she’s pregnant.

Agency handler Chuck (Kyle Chandler) dispatches them to crack the safe of Eastern European terrorist Balthazar Gor (Robert Besta) and get hold of a master-key capable of crashing or controlling any system in the world. Matt and Emily are unarmed when the alarm is triggered and in what becomes a running theme, the pair must improvise to fend off Gor’s thugs with whatever objects are at hand, along with their impressive fist- and footwork.

Soon after Matt learns he’s going to be a dad, they survive a deadly assault, an aerial disaster and a precipitous nosedive on snow-covered alps. He suggests it’s time for them to quit the spy game and go off the grid, their presumed death in the latest narrow escape giving them the perfect cover. Cue main title card.

Jumping ahead to the present, Matt and Emily are living an everyday family life, raising two children — sullen 14-year-old Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her brother Leo (Rylan Jackson), who’s 11 — in the squeaky-clean suburbs of an unnamed American city.

Frustrated by Alice’s increasing hostility toward her, Emily starts to suspect she’s lying about study evenings at a friend’s house. This prompts both parents to resort to old spy tactics, resulting in an amusingly messy intervention during which their spontaneous badassery startles their mortified daughter. Matt attempts to shrug off her questions about their physical prowess: “We took a couple taekwondo lessons.”

When one of Alice’s friends posts video of the incident online, Matt and Emily’s cover is blown. Chuck turns up at their door, revealing that the master-key was never recovered from the scene of the plane crash, and if he managed to track them down so easily it won’t be long before Gor’s goon squad does the same.

Evading a storm of bullets and a fleet of hitmen in a high-speed chase through the burbs, they whisk the completely confused Alice and Leo out of school and hop a flight to London. But they don’t stay out of sight for long. Gor’s mercenaries are soon on their tails, along with MI6, led by Baron (Andrew Scott), a shifty type with a longtime crush on Emily, despite not making it past the first date years earlier.

One of the standout set-pieces takes place at a gas station outside London, where Alice and Leo watch slack-jawed through a diner window as their folks take down a team of heavily armed assassins. Matt’s creative use of a petrol pump is a nice touch, as is the weaponizing of a bottle of Diet Coke and a tube of Mentos a little earlier. But there’s only so much the kids can witness before Matt and Emily are forced to come clean about their international espionage credentials.

For strategic plot reasons, the family heads to the gated country manor of Emily’s English mother Ginny (Glenn Close), who finally gets to meet her grandchildren. Observing the frostiness between Ginny — later described as “an MI6 girlboss legend” — and Emily gives Alice insight into her mother’s over-protectiveness.

The introduction of Ginny and her younger lover Nigel (Jamie Demetriou), an over-eager but inept wannabe spy whom she humors with false encouragement, pushes the comedy into daffier, more over-the-top territory. (Close, who also does her own fight scenes, leans so hard into the posh hauteur she could be auditioning for 103 Dalmatians; Demetriou is serving quite large Brit sitcom shtick.)

But they’re endearing and they serve a purpose — providing a splendid location for a siege when the family is traced and then proving useful when the action shifts first to a formal event at the Tate Modern and then to a climactic chase down the Thames involving both boats and a motorbike. While all that is unfolding, not one but two key characters are revealed to be not what they seem.

Naturally, all the espionage action and threats to world order serve in large part to bring the family closer together and cause the kids (both exceptionally well-cast) to reassess the parents they believed to be terminally uncool. Alice and Leo also show the kind of gumption that suggests spycraft runs in the bloodline. The movie won’t carve a spot in the classic action-comedy canon, but it’s easily digested fun, which is no bad thing.