Review: I-Spy
The bottle of common sense that I have talked about in so many of my reviews over the years must be completely out, or at least the folks over at Sony must have lost the bottle in the washing machine, because I Spy, while a kind-of-cool spy movie, is just so utterly dumb that it pains me to watch.
I Spy, a remake based loosely on the 1960s series of the same name, stars Eddie Murphy who is going for a record of how many flops he can have in one year, right now he is tied with Antonia Banderas for that honor, and Owen Wilson, who has been teamed up with just about everyone in the entertainment industry for buddy picture after buddy picture, fails to capitalize on his Shanghi Noon success.
The films premise is as follows. Wilson is Alex Scott and elite (loosely using the term here) secret agent who is given the task of finding a stolen top secret jet called the Switchblade that is currently in the possession of an arms dealer played by Malcolm McDowell. In order to get close enough to plant a tracking unit on McDowell’s character Scott and the Bureau of Nation Security (BNS) have him team up with Kelly Robinson a famous boxer, whom the arms dealer loves. The real problem is after the tracking bug is planted, why the hell does Eddie Murphy’s character stick around. His job is done, yet he just stays around for the hell of it, and the terror of the audience.
Overall the story is weak at best, and more cliché than any sappy love story you will seen on the big screen this year. From plot points that you can see from a mile away to the most lame-brained story ever, the movie just doesn’t do much for you, which is good in a way, because the people who were in the theatre with me could have used some help figuring things out rather than think about it on the drive home to their trailer park.
The biggest flaw of the movie is it isn’t overly funny, in fact, aside from a few parts where you get a good chuckle or a big hearty laugh, there isn’t a single time when you are cracking up continuously. Even with the James Bond spoofing and the campy action that makes no sense, the movie just isn’t that humorous at all. Maybe I have seen too many comedies this year, but most of the material is just stale when compared to some of the other stuff to be released this year.
Sticking around for the climax of the movie is like drilling a rusty drill-bit into your knee. This comes from the fact that the ending is just so utterly stupid, so utterly dumb, and so utterly infeasible that you just want to cripple yourself so you wouldn’t have to watch it. With the paper thin story and plot holes large enough to drive a Volkswagen through I-Spy just fails to impress when so many better comedies have come out this year. Stick with Undercover Brother or Austin Powers: in Goldmember for the laughs you are looking for.
