I Spy

Hollywood continues its pillage of TV archives with this sometimes funny but mostly banal action-comedy that has only superficial links to its 1960s source. Columbia Pictures basically bought a commodity name in hopes of drawing baby boomers to the box office and then tried to refashion that product (with Owen Wilson as a special secret agent and Eddie Murphy as a championship boxer recruited into espionage service) to attract a younger audience, also. The makers failed to come up with a script that was as ambitious as their marketing strategy. The film is hamstrung by a leaden story about a stolen stealth fighter jet that turns invisible with the click of a remote control. The movie feels more like a shotgun wedding of Get Smart and Rush Hour than a renovation and refreshment of the show that was once very popular and was an extremely cool cultural milestone—a show that, for the first time on TV, teamed a black (Bill Cosby) and a white (Robert Culp) American as series stars.