Cameron Diaz Is Back, but This Netflix Movie With 23% on RT Was the Worst Way to Return

Cameron Diaz last appeared on screen in 2014 in the musical Annie and in the comedy Sex Tape. The actress left the cinema – along with her, the genres she symbolized left: comedy without brakes and carefree romance.

Her comeback, without unnecessary expectations, is happening to the sound of gunshots, because Netflix does not waste time and year after year tries to release its equivalent of Mission: Impossible. This time it's Back in Action.

What Is Back in Action About?

Matt and Emily are former CIA special agents who live a quiet life raising two children. Inevitably, the prosperous family falls into the sights of various criminal groups – all because of a secret key that allows them to control electronic systems, which Matt has hidden.

Now the family is forced to flee to England – not only to escape the annoying bosses of the criminal world and for official reasons, but also to solve personal problems.

There's No Chemistry Between Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx

Spies/spouses is a familiar trope for the genre. Such movies have a very clear trigger for intrigue – the compulsive tossing of characters between work and maintaining the status of an exemplary family.

The routine of the secret service becomes a yoke around the necks of Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz – the actors try to create the so-called "chemistry": the wife tells her husband about her pregnancy in the heat of a dangerous mission, and then the duo throws villains all over the plane.

Back in Action Looks Like Every Other Spy Movie Full of Clichés

To call Back in Action a spectacular blockbuster would be an exaggeration. There is not a hint of big-budget cinema on screen, just a boring set of rules in which everything is done according to the streaming canon: a few shootouts and fights, a few loud car chases and awkward jokes.

You don't expect revelations from a weekend comedy. But Back in Action is the kind of action movie that AI will soon be able to easily generate, taking into account and reworking all the established genre clichés.

The movie inadvertently destroys both the magic of the spy lifestyle and the interest in streaming movies about secret missions. Everything on screen looks fake, which can be explained by the writers' reluctance to go into detail – why everyone needs a secret key so much, we never get an answer.