Spies in Disguise (2019)

Spies in Disguise arrives as a Blue Sky Studios production, the last of that house before Disney shuttered it, and it carries the mild, well-meaning disposition of a studio doing its job without fuss. Will Smith voices Lance Sterling, a super spy with abundant self-regard, and Tom Holland voices Walter Beckett, a teenage scientist who turns his colleague into a pigeon. The premise is silly and the film knows it. What interests us here is not the caper but the quiet ideological furniture arranged around it.

The voice cast is diverse in a way that feels ordinary: Rashida Jones as a relentless internal affairs agent, Reba McEntire as the agency director, Karen Gillan and DJ Khaled as paired specialists, Masi Oka as an arms dealer. Women hold authority throughout, and the film never argues about it. Walter, the MIT graduate at fifteen, is coded as an outcast genius whose awkwardness is a trait, not a diagnosis, which gestures toward a certain modern sensitivity without naming it. The film's one message, delivered softly, is that nonlethal solutions beat lethal ones, and the agency eventually concedes the point. It is a moral offered as a shrug.

Elsewhere the cupboards are bare. No LGBTQ characters or subtext. No environmental crusade, despite a stray keyword promising to save the planet. No critique of the gadget economy or the spy agency's budget. No body-image themes. No historical revision, since the whole affair is invented. Race is never a subject, only a fact of casting. The result is a competent, cheerful cartoon that flirts with contemporary sensibilities and commits to almost none of them. It is the cinematic equivalent of a polite guest who reads the room and says nothing.