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 ollywood movies don't get anymore superfluous than the big
screen, big budget remake of the Bill Cosby TV series "I Spy". Seeing
as how there is no real reason, good or bad, for the movie to even exist in the
first place other than to capitalize on the whole remaking a TV show into a
feature length movie trend, you can either watch "I Spy" or not, and
nothing about anything will have changed as a result.
"I Spy" is directed by Betty Thomas ("Private
Parts") and stars Owen Wilson ("Shanghai
Knights") as Alex, a spy for a fictitious American agency. Alex is
something of a loser, or to be more exact, a lower class of spy at his agency.
The real spy stud is Carlos (Gary Cole), who besides bedding all the women and
getting all the cool assignments also gets equipped with all the cool gadgets
ala James Bond. Poor Alex is saddled with lousy missions and "spy"
gadgets the size of a car. When Alex is sent to recover a stolen super duper
plane from bad guy Malcolm McDowell in a foreign country, he's partnered up with
loudmouth boxer Kelly (Eddie Murphy), who has a bad habit of talking about
himself in the third person.
Besides a series of wholly contrived situations that leads
up to the final action sequence on top of a bridge, "I Spy" is good
for a laugh, if nothing else. Not a lot of laughs, mine you, but some laughs.
It's harmless fun, and Eddie Murphy seems perfectly at home as the glitzy boxer
who can rattle off insults and quips as fast as he can think of them -- or
perhaps faster. Owen Wilson, on the other hand, seems a bit "off"
playing the straight man in this Buddy Cop movie. Even so, Wilson gets off some
good one-liners that aren't completely lame.
"I Spy" is such a harmless movie that I won't
even bother trying to address all of its fallacies. I should only point out that
Famke Janssen ("X-Men 2")
makes one heck of a hot spy, and those legs of hers seem to go on forever,
especially when she sports a black leather mini-skirt. Malcolm McDowell ("Gangster
No.1") is basically basking in a big payday, since he only appears in
limited screentime and has what amounts to a glorified cameo. Hope you spend
that paycheck wisely, Malcolm.
Action-comedies like "I Spy" are a dime a dozen
nowadays in Hollywood. I swear they crank out these types of movies by the
dozens in any given month. Unlike a lot of other action-comedies, "I
Spy" never really bothers to take anything seriously, and that's a plus.
People get shot all over the place but you never see any blood. The comedy is
sometimes interesting, but never really inspired. Chuckles can be had, but no
big laughs. Alex's schoolboy crush on Janssen's Rachel is a winner, but the rest
is hit and miss.
The film is good for a lark, and it certainly isn't a bad
way to waste 90 minutes, even though that's exactly what you're doing -- wasting
90 minutes for no real good reason.
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