The Spy Next Door (2010)

The Spy Next Door arrives in the twilight of Jackie Chan's American period, a 2010 family comedy in which the star plays Bob Ho, a CIA operative on loan from Chinese Intelligence who retires to court his neighbor and mind her three children. The premise is well-worn: spy meets domesticity, slapstick ensues, a Russian terrorist named Poldark escapes custody and demands a formula. We have seen this film before, several times, and it has never once asked us to think about it afterward.

The cultural inventory here is thin but not empty. Chan headlines as a Chinese agent, and the supporting cast includes George Lopez as a corrupt boss and Billy Ray Cyrus as a partner, yet the film never pauses to remark on any of it. The characters simply exist, which is the ordinary condition of casting and not a statement. The MacGuffin is an oil-eating bacteria engineered to clean up oil spills, a whisper of environmental conscience that functions only as a plot device. The emotional climax concerns whether a stepdaughter will accept her siblings and call her mother 'Mom', a humanist sentiment about chosen family that predates the current cultural moment by decades.

The film, then, is a gentle, poorly reviewed studio comedy that lectures no one. It wants only to place Chan in a series of escalating household mishaps and let children laugh. There is no sermon, no accounting of power, no instruction on how to live. The Spy Next Door is content to be forgettable, and it succeeds with a thoroughness its critics were happy to note. We score it accordingly, with the mild fatigue of a sommelier presented a bottle of room-temperature lager.