Spy games

Hollywood continues its pillage of television series archives with I Spy, a sometimes very 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 ticket booth and then attempted to refashion that product (with Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy in the lead roles) to attract a younger audience, also.

Too bad the makers couldn’t come up with a script that was half as ambitious as their marketing strategy. Instead, the film is hamstrung by a leaden, underdeveloped story that feels more like a hurried shotgun marriage between Get Smart and Rush Hour than an intelligent renovation of a once very popular and extremely cool cultural and entertainment milestone.

I Spy the TV show’s partnership of a black and a white American as series stars was a network first. For his work in the series, stand-up comedian Bill Cosby won three consecutive Emmys for best actor in a drama, as an Ivy League scholar turned international spy who masquerades as a pro tennis trainer. The role fit him better than any of his later Huxtable sweaters. Robert Culp became a poster boy for casual swingers as a court-circuit contender. The show had a very fluid, seamless blend of humor and suspense. It also projected an innate, relaxed hipness free of smug and narcissistic posturing.

I Spy the movie is a completely different breed of animal. It is louder and cruder and emphasizes special effects over suspense. It’s not disastrous but rather so funny on occasion that the mediocre general body and execution of the production comparatively feels like a huge, nagging anchor around the necks of its game stars. The guffaws are cheap but deep, providing blasts of exhilaration that nearly made me forgive the film’s mindless dawdling and chases and shootouts. But nearly is the operative word here. Director Betty Thomas, the former Hill Street Blues cop who successfully parodied nostalgic family wholesomeness with The Brady Bunch Movie, seems stumped at how to make action and excitement synonymous, and the best scenes between Wilson and Murphy feel more improvised than scripted.

The names and general roles of the original characters are reversed here, with Wilson playing special agent Alex Scott and Murphy playing middleweight boxing champion Kelly Robinson. European boxing enthusiast and notorious arms dealer Gundars (Malcolm McDowell sadly without the menace he so rabidly embraced in the Gangster No. 1) steals a secret fighter jet called the Switchblade that can be made invisible with the click of a remote control. He has set up an auction for the plane that coincides with a Budapest title bout in which Kelly attempts his 58th victory. So, Alex joins Kelly’s entourage, and the two reluctantly join forces to retrieve the plane before it can be purchased and used for mass destruction by terrorists.

The film turns out primarily to be a secret-agent regurgitation of those familiar buddy-cop type pictures in which the main characters need to stop badgering and battering each other long enough to complete their assignment (or mission). Take away the title, and most audiences would be hard pressed to link the multiracial characters and their alternating ace-sleuth work and blundering to a network hit.

An unrequited romance between the insecure Alex and tough-as-nails female agent (GoldenEye’s Famke Janssen) provides one comic highlight, with a Cyrano de Bergerac twist in which Kelly feeds the words of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” through the ear piece of the crooning Alex. Other light moments are generated by Kelly’s rivalry with famed fellow agent Carlos (Gary Cole as an Antonio Banderas caricature). A lengthy scene in a sewer of Budapest, with Alex and Kelly blubbering from the effects of methane gas, comes the closest to being a classic hoot.

Murphy is fine as the arrogant pugilist who constantly refers to himself in the third tense. Wilson is even better as the agent focused on landing a stakeout assignment with a female associate. With his broken nose and deadpan delivery, he proves that classically handsome is not a prerequisite for being a leading man and that less is best and timing is everything when pursuing a laugh. His performance and this film left me not hungering for I Spy 2 but rather Shanghai Knights, the soon-to-be-released follow-up to Shanghai Noon in which Wilson reunites with Jackie Chan.