.jpg)
It may be sad whenever a celebrity dies before his or her time, but is it necessarily a bad thing? Now, before you answer, consider Bruce Lee. If he hadn’t died at age 32 under mysterious circumstances his legacy would’ve soured as he grew older, heavier and less picky with his projects. Eventually he wouldn’t be remembered as the star of “Enter the Dragon” but as that old guy who performed the voice of a farting dragon in “Kung Fu Panda 3.” In other words, over time Lee would transform into someone like Jackie Chan.
Mind you, nobody is insinuating that Chan should have died in his early 30s. We all love his brand of special effects and chopping bricks. It’s just that the Chan who would willingly jump over a moving bullet train while on fire as a pair of lobsters grip painfully to his testicles is now in his mid-50s and simply can’t perform the tricks that we as a nation of entitled assholes need and demand. This softer, family-friendly Chan is starting to overshadow the exciting Chan of yesteryear, and as callous as it is to say, a premature death would’ve prevented Chan from appearing alongside Hannah Montana’s dad in a film directed by the guy who gave us “Snow Dogs.”
As Mark Twain once wrote, “I’d rather be crushed to death by Mr. Whitney’s amazing cotton gin than stand within whiffing distance of this Billy Ray Cyrus chappy. Mustache wax.”
In “The Spy Next Door,” Chan plays Bob Ho, a secret agent who is pretending to be a schlubby pen importer. As a side note, are there actual pen importers? Why give him a cover job that sounds so transparently phony? Why not just call him a fruit recognizer or a zebra puncher? At least those jobs sound slightly more believable than a pen importer. At any rate, Bob plans on retiring and marrying his girlfriend (Amber Valletta) even though her three obnoxious children clearly loathe him and his fake pens. However, when a dumb plot contrivance causes Valletta to leave town for a couple of days, Bob volunteers to look after them. After all, as Bob notes, he “brought down dictators. How tough can three kids be?” Surprisingly tough, especially when one of them accidentally downloads some important information and causes a group of comically inept Russian mafia/terrorist types to pay them a visit. Excruciating “Home Alone”-style slapstick ensues.
As empty gestures go, reviewing a movie like “The Spy Next Door” ranks as probably the emptiest. Mainly because “The Spy Next Door’s” target audience can’t read and couldn’t care less what some mean old man has to say about it. For everyone else above the age of five, “The Spy Next Door” is obviously a bad, disposable movie and doesn’t need a mean old man to tell them what they already know. So instead, let’s focus on the few positive aspects of this movie. Even though Chan’s best days are long behind him, he’s still nimble for a man his age, and though the stunts lack the mind-blowing insanity of those featured in “Drunken Master 2” and “Operation Condor,” they’re still an obvious highlight (particularly the one involving a child’s bicycle). Too bad there weren’t more of them.
In a perfect world all Jackie Chan movies would dispense with the pretense of a plot and simply give us 90 minutes of Chan fighting Yakuza members and alligators along the ledges of the Sears Roebuck building. Unfortunately this world is far from perfect, and this is why we get him stiffly mugging through a pointless rip-off of “The Pacifier.”
Rating: W
.jpg)
