Cheap I Spy (DVD) (Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, Famke Janssen) (Betty Thomas) Price

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Customer Reviews of I Spy

I Spy a painfully generic action/comedy.
The trailers for I Spy were pretty damn funny, and the movie starred Owen Wilson, a fine comic actor who continues to grow on me with each successive performance. So it's unfortunate I Spy ends up as nothing more than a second-rate action/comedy, severely lacking in thrills, spills, and belly laughs. Undiscriminating twelve-year olds will probably enjoy it, but for most everyone else, this is as routine as spy comedies get.

Alex Scott (Owen Wilson) is a spy who's just been handed a new partner, Kelly Robinson (Eddy Murphy), a selfish, hot-headed, motor-mouthed boxer with a quick temper. Their assignment: to retrieve an important spy plane (which can camouflage, no less) that's about to be sold to terrorist bidders. There's also Famke Janssen as another secret agent whose only purpose here is to spice up the sex appeal (not that I'm complaining).

I Spy's biggest and most glaring flaw is that it's just not very funny. Yes, there are a handful of laughs; I did like the scene where Wilson compared his equipment with another top spy's, and I also liked the scene where Wilson tried to woo Janssen. But aside from the plain fact much of the material isn't funny, the problem is also that there's no sense of continuity or balance; the jokes are thrown around without much care to whether it actually fits the moment, and this has quite a jarring and unpleasant effect on the movie's entertainment value.

The action scenes, which often feel rather padded (much like some of the jokes), aren't any better. There are quite a few requisite chases, shootouts, and fights but the choreography is subpar and the action is so lightweight, you never get the feeling anyone's in danger in spite of the mounting body count. The story's pretty lame, it's all really just a bunch of comic and action setpieces strung together, which would be fine if those scenes worked, but they generally don't.

In many ways, I Spy is a wildly schizophrenic film, never maintaining a consistency with its humor or thrills (or really genuinely delivering much of them), and the same goes with the performances. While Wilson is relatively likeable and charming, Eddie Murphy is just annoying, spending most of his screen time ranting about this and that, usually lines of dialogue that are unfunny and have absolutely nothing to do with the "plot."

Directed by Betty Thomas, it's as if though she never had a firm grasp of the material, trying to put the film together as an action thriller/buddy comedy but never succeeding as either. I spy isn't horrible, but it'll probably make you wish you'd spent your money on something else.
* 1/2 out of *****

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i spy was a relly fun movie too see. and owen wilson is better on this movie than shanghai noon and shanghai knights.

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this movie was very very marvelous. and the beggining was funny.