Susan Granger’s review of “The Spy Next Door” (Lionsgate)
Jackie Chan is looking for a piece of the lucrative family market with this lame-brained comedy. He plays Bob Ho, a mild-mannered pen importer who moonlights as an undercover CIA agent. He’s just the kind of “honest” guy that his suburban single-mom neighbor Gillian (supermodel Amber Valleta) really wants in her life, but her three kids find him dull as dishwater.
So when Gilliam must leave town to care for a sick relative, boring Bob offers to watch over of her sullen, sarcastic teenage daughter Farren (Madeline Carroll), nerdy technophile son Ian (Will Shandley) and adorable four year-old Nora (Alina Foley) who loves to dress like a Princess, leaving the spy chores to his CIA colleagues (George Lopez, Billy Ray Cyrus) in the Albuquerque office.
Predictably, Bob proves to be totally incompetent around the house. But when Ian accidentally intercepts and downloads on his iPod a top-secret formula for a bacteria-devouring chemical that can destroy most of the world’s oil, the family is besieged by evil Russians, Poldark (Magnus Scheving) and Creel (Katherine Boecher), propelling protective Bob to install cool gadgets like closed-circuit cameras and kiddie LoJacks, before doing cartoonish acrobatic battle.
If this plot, concocted by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer and Gregory Poirier, sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because they borrowed liberally from “The Pacifier” (2005), in which Vin Diesel played an undercover agent caring for five kids, along with bits from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Kindergarten Cop.” As if to compensate for dumb dialogue and the total lack of originality, kid-friendly director Brian Levant (“Beethoven,” “Jingle All the Way”) encourages the youngsters to be far more obnoxious than they need to be. Now 55, Jackie Chan stands a better chance at the box-office in the upcoming remake of “The Karate Kid” with Will Smith’s son Jaden.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Spy Next Door” is a tedious, tiresome 3. Not surprisingly, the gag reel over the concluding credits is funnier than the 90 minutes that preceded it. Because, as Gillian says, “You can’t make kids like you.”
