Netflix And Chill: The Spy Next Door (2010)

Putting Jackie Chan in more family-friendly fare that should appeal to a mass American audience has rarely been a good thing, With a few notable exceptions, the results have been quite turgid. They also often make the huge mistake of covering up any Chan antics with special effects, which obfuscates their best special effect (Jackie Chan himself).

So I didn't head into The Spy Next Door with any great expectations. It's all about a retiring special agent named Bob Ho (Chan) who is dating a lovely woman (Gillian, played by Amber Valletta) and ends up looking after her three kids for a few days. The children are, in descending age order, Farren (Madeline Carroll), Ian (Will Shadley), and Nora (Alina Foley). Unaware of what Bob actually did for a living, the kids are soon surprised when they encounter a number of villains who are out to get him.

Director Brian Levant may have quite a few family features under his belt (including BOTH of The Flintstones movies and Jingle All The Way), and the writing team of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, joined here by Gregory Poirier, also have experience of aiming at younger viewers (the first two having also written Lindsay Lohan vehicle, Just My Luck). Which is all well and good, yet nobody knows how best to use Chan, once again.

Having said that, nobody here wanders into the outright awful mistreatment of Chan as we saw in the likes of The Medallion and The Tuxedo. While this is a less stunt-packed movie, some of the fight scenes aren't too bad, and there are some mildly amusing set-pieces. It's just a shame that, inevitably, fans of the star will have seen him do stuff like this with much better results. 

The cast are a very mixed bag. The three kids do quite well though. Carroll is the moody teen, Shadley is the young bright spark, and Foley is the cute youngest one. And Chan is Chan, which means he's pretty wonderful in pretty much anything he does. Valletta is sidelined for a lot of the film, but she's perfectly fine. Magnûs Scheving is the main villain, and there's an amusing running joke about people bringing him back unsuitable clothing from the shops. Alongside Katherine Boecher (playing Creel, his right-hand woman), Scheving is required to play his role without any real sense of threat or menace. That's a shame, because it makes everything seem much more inconsequential. Lucas Till is enjoyable in a small role, which is more than I can say for Billy Ray Cyrus (who plays Colton James, a colleague of Bob). And you have George Lopez in the role of Glaze, with him trying his best in a role that takes the most predictable turn you expect once the plot starts to kick into gear.

Taken by itself, this is far from a terrible movie. It's not a great one either. It's just a passable bit of family fare. But Chan fans have so many other films to compare it to, and that's when it starts to look worse and worse. MAYBE a decent introduction to the superstar for younger viewers, I'd certainly ask you to consider it ahead of the other two titles mentioned just above (although I have a bit more of a soft spot for The Tuxedo nowadays, thanks to the cast).

4/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Unsane (2018)

Steven Soderbergh has a way of presenting familiar material in a way that makes it feel fresh and interesting, whether it's the more naturalistic and low-key fights in Haywire, the glossy coating that encases the trashiness of Side Effects, or the effortless cool that transforms many of the films he has done with George Clooney in the leading role.

Unsane is quite a standard psychological thriller, competently put together but not spectacular in any way. The only new thing that Soderbergh brings to the table is filming it all on a phone (and it's not the first film to be made that way, but it may be the first relatively mainstream film to utilise that approach).

Claire Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, a young woman who goes to therapy sessions in order to deal with the big problem in her life, which viewers are left wondering about. Has Sawyer been seeing a stalker everywhere, was she traumatised by a past event, or is her mind refusing to give her any peace? Things get worse for Sawyer when she signs what she thinks is a standard bit of paperwork and ends up committed to a mental institution against her will. She is determined to be released, stating that she isn't crazy, but that's also what crazy people say. And then she realises that one of the staff members is her stalker.

There's a very good central performance here from Foy, who is supported by Joshua Leonard (as the possible stalker), Juno Temple (another patient in the facility), and Jay Pharoah (also another patient), all doing good work. And you get a nice cameo role for Amy Irving, so I have no problems with the cast.

The script, written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, isn't as good as the cast deserve. It's okay, especially considering that these writers previously gave us films such as, well, Just My Luck and The Spy Next Door, but it's often either not as tight as it could be or it's just too predictable. The ideas here are more important than the dialogue, this isn't a film full of quotable lines, but the fact that those ideas end up lacking a certain something is a disappointment.

Soderbergh directs with his usual level of polish, even through a phone camera, but he never feels like the best fit for the material. Imagine what De Palma could have done here, or perhaps M. Night Shyamalan. Having recently been reminded of her talent, Lynne Ramsay could have taken us further into a troubled mind. But we're stuck with Soderbergh, who does fine. He just doesn't make things as interesting or thrilling as they could be.

6/10

You can buy Unsane here.
Americans can buy it here.