The Spy Next Door [PG]

Chinese spy Bob Ho is on loan to the CIA to capture a man called Poldark. Whilst saving the world, Bob is simultaneously dating his neighbour Gillian and being hated by her three children. But when he puts Poldark behind bars, Bob retires from the spy game to settle down, marry Gillian and get to know her family. After all, he’s overthrown evil dictators, how hard can three kids possibly be? 

I don’t know what was going through my mind when I hired this movie. All it is, is 94 minutes of karate fight sequences with the occasional heartfelt chat thrown in. It was trying to be The Pacifier and failing miserably. 

Bob Ho is an international Chinese spy who is on loan to the CIA to help capture a Russian mastermind known as Poldark. Whilst ridding the world of the bad guys, Bob is simultaneously posing as a pen importer and dating his neighbour Gillian, a single mother with three kids who hate Bob’s guts. Once Bob puts Poldark behind bars, he retires from the spy game to settle down, marry Gillian, and get to know and love her family. But his retirement is short-lived when Poldark escapes and Gillian has to fly to Denver to look after her father, leaving the kids in Bob’s care. Whilst doing their own investigation on Bob, the kids mistake a top-secret file stolen from the Russians as a bootleg copy of a concert and download it. With the Russians desperate to get the file back and the kids making his life a living hell, this is the toughest assignment that Bob has ever had to endure. 

Pitched as a fun family comedy, The Spy Next Door was just over an hour of high-tech gadgets, temper tantrums, and karate fight sequences. I found that the film relied rather heavily on the action, which seemed to be the only thing that it had going for it. The story was pretty average, the characters where clichés that have been seen time and time again, the performances where pretty much whatever, and there was no real balance between the action and the scenes where Bob and the kids connect. It looked as though the film was trying to recreate the magic of The Pacifier, but failing miserably. 

Jackie Chan is Bob Ho and really, you can’t really do anything spectacular with this character. A spy who gives up one life of action for another that’s even more troublesome, you don’t really have much legroom. 

There are too many twists of the plot too. The story leads you in a direction where it seems that Bob and the kids are connecting and then suddenly changes so all the characters are back to square one. It’s not smooth or consistent at all. 

All in all, I found The Spy Next Door to be an average comedy, really more appealing for the kids than anyone over the age of thirteen. It’s definitely not a film that I would add to my collection.