I Spy
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
I suppose by now that it is impossible to make a movie like I Spy without referencing, constantly, all of the other movies that have gone before. Even the title is derivative, referring to a Sixties television spy comedy with Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. There is the requisite scene in the spy laboratory, a copy of the one endlessly recycled by the James Bond franchise. Even the stars of the movie bring in their own baggage. Owen Wilson begins this movie, er, Behind Enemy Lines, shall we say; he plays a pilot in both films. Eddie Murphy has done this sort of thing before, of course; and I Spy isn’t that far removed from 48 Hours, let’s say.
I know that it is hard to make a comedy action movie without referring to countless other movies; I know this because it’s almost impossible not to write a movie review without such references. In fact, the only way you write a movie review for a flick like I Spy is to find one movie reference and stick to it. Otherwise, you’ll never get it down to a manageable length. (Although, come to think of it, this has never been an issue before now.
Very well. I Spy is essentially a slick and unserious take on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It has all the basic plot points from the movie intact. There are kicks to the male groinal regions, as well as some more direct threats. There is a scene where our heroes have to take a leap from a great height, and one where they wonder who the guys are that are chasing them. There is a sizable amount of confusion as to who the good guys and the bad guys really are. And, yes, there is a scene where too much dynamite is used.
That I Spy has nowhere near the quality of Butch Cassidy should go without saying. There is no backdrop of a dying frontier; in fact, I Spy is well-positioned on the High Frontier, with high-tech defense gadgets and whatnot. There is no sense of wistfulness or romance or anything like that. And, Hollywood being what it is, the very idea of a no-chance shootout at the dead end of a glorious road is simply unthinkable. I Spy doesn’t have any pretensions of being anything more than what it is, of saying anything more of what it wants to. (Even its male-bonding scenes are played for laughs.)
Compared to Butch Cassidy, I Spy is a pale retelling, a throwaway piece, a mindless piece of high-concept low-execution studio fluff. But it shares one other element with Butch Cassidy, and it is the element that saves the movie. I Spy has Star Power, has it in every direction you care to name, and if Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy aren’t Paul Newman and Robert Redford, well, who is?
Wilson in particular is brilliant. (It helps, of course, from my perspective anyway, that he’s a Texan, a talented writer, and kind of funny-looking.) Here, he’s not overtly trying to be funny — the way he was in Zoolander, say — but he still manages to hold his own against Eddie Murphy in the comedy department, which is pretty stout. Wilson is a member of a super-secret homeland defense agency, lost in the shadow of a headline-grabbing super agent named Carlos, constantly whining and complaining about not getting enough respect or enough cool spy gadgets. There aren’t that many actors that can take a character that is essentially hang-dog and put-upon and make him, well, cool, but Wilson can and does, with a kind of unforced, relaxed charm.
And then there is Eddie Murphy, who here plays a boxer, a second-generation Muhammad Ali, loud, obnoxious, and charismatic. Murphy’s outsized egotism and boundless self confidence play well against Wilson’s self-effacing charm. Murphy’s relentless nonstop chatter provides the bulk of the laughs, and it is his comic skills that carry the movie. While it’s nothing we haven’t seen before from Murphy, I Spy is still fun and enjoyable and so aggressively silly that it’s more than a worthwhile effort.
What makes I Spy work is that so much of the humor revolves around the concept of manipulation. Murphy wants to help save the day (this involves recovering a stolen invisible Harrier jumpjet), but only on his terms, and only if there is a big parade afterwards. Wilson has to wheedle him along, manipulate him into doing things that he wouldn’t otherwise normally do, and the results are generally hilarious. Not to mention that Murphy is helping manipulate Wilson in regards to his romantic life (with convincingly Hungarian Famke Janssen, playing a rival spy).
I Spy is no one’s idea of a classic action movie, or even a classic action comedy; it’s essentially too light and unserious for that. (The fact that it may be the best movie adapted from a television series since The Fugitive says incredibly little, as you might expect.) But it has just enough Star Power to keep it going through the silly, empty plot, and just enough comic talent in the pairing of Wilson and Murphy to make the experience enjoyable, if not thrilling or memorable. The only real problem with I Spy is the possibility — or the certainty — that it, too, will spawn derivative knock-offs of its own.