Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016)

Keeping Up with the Joneses arrives from 2016, a year in which a studio could still release an action comedy about a suburban Atlanta couple and the glamorous spies next door without any obligation to say something. Greg Mottola directs with a shrug. Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot play the operatives, Isla Fisher and Zach Galifianakis play the civilians, and the film assumes a cul-de-sac is a funny place to hide a listening device. The cast is white, affluent, and lit like a furniture catalog. Two minor supporting performers drift through the margins, and nobody involved seems to have cast them with any design beyond staffing a scene.

Fisher's Karen does more than her share of the work. She snoops, she follows, she gets stunned by a pen gun, and she drives the rescue, which is more agency than the average 2016 wife role manages. Gadot's Natalie handles her own fights. Neither performance arrives attached to an argument about anything. The film's one recurring gag, that the Joneses are impossibly gorgeous, is played for envy, not for any statement about bodies. Race goes unmentioned in a town populated entirely by the comfortably white. A defense contractor sits at the center of the plot, and a colleague sells experimental microchips to an arms dealer, but this is tradecraft as furniture, with no economic grievance in sight. There is no secondary subplot, no representative character, no same-sex pairing, no environmental concern, no neurological quirk. The film has exactly one subject, which is whether the neighbors are spies. They are.

The guiding principle throughout is pleasantness. Nobody lectures. Nobody has a thesis. Critics observed that the jokes did not land and that the assembled comedians deserved better, and the box office agreed, returning $29.9 million against a $40 million budget. The film now functions as a document of a vanished mode, the studio comedy with nothing on its mind and no interest in acquiring anything. Not a recommendation. An observation.