The spy who fucked me

The Spy Next Door
Directed Brian Levant
Written by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer, Gregory Poirier
Starring Jackie Chan

The Spy Next Door isn’t really a kids movie so much as a movie for kids, the distinction being that the former is something designed to genuinely engage kids while entertaining them, while the latter is something to plunk them in front of so they’ll shut up for an hour and a half. If that last bit seems at all cynical, I can assure you it’s not half as disrespectful to children as any of this film is. I get that we shouldn’t necessarily expect a lot of shading and nuance for entertainment aimed at children, but we can assume that they’re able to make it 90 minutes without shitting themselves, which is more self-awareness than The Spy Next Door credits them for.

I’ll forgive the plot—badass guy, in this case the actually rather cute and cuddly Jackie Chan, has to take care of, the horrors, children—but the rest of the film isn’t so much broad strokes as it is buckets of paint thrown haphazardly at the screen. The children’s mother, who is rather inexplicably dating her neighbour Jackie Chan—I say that as much because of the obvious 20-year age difference as the fact it is literally unexplained throughout, because it might cut into badass-dealing-with-cute-kids time—is an artist single mom of three living in a roughly 2000 square foot suburban palace, which would be inexplicable in itself except that it’s obviously because that house is more recognizable to the outskirts-living parents the producers are hoping will plop their kids in the multiplex with a Kinder Surprise meal. Not that she hangs around enough to even really be considered a character.

The kids are even worse. The youngest is a pink-obsessed, esoteric-animal-loving (she’s got both a turtle and a potbellied pig, maybe because one of the producers has stock in a pet store?) moppet who pronounces all her “r”s as “w”s, as apparently hamming it up in front of a camera is a bown-in skill for some people. The middle child is a nerd, which we know because he wears oxford shirts and uses words like “hypothesis,” though doesn’t have taped-up horn rims, in a welcome bit of restraint. The eldest is an angry teenager, because most of the people who will take their kids to see this film aren’t interested enough in listening to or raising children to deal with them when they start having real emotions. Oh, and her dad disappeared, or something. Apparently he’s still making rather generous child-support payments, though, unless her mom is the resident artist at Sotheby’s.

Beyond that core, who we are forced to spend most of the movie with, we have a cadre of villains sporting accents that it would be an insult to Jay Ward to call Boris and Natasha. They don’t do much but get beat up by Jackie Chan—nothing goes with family comedy like Chan-brand comic violence—excepting the lady one, who is also wearing a push-up bra in case any of the boys in the audience have hit puberty kind of early. If you do insist on plunking your kids in front of this, do yourself a favour and bring your taxes or something, so the experience isn’t a complete write-off. (Zing!)