‘Comedic Chemistry Takes Priority in ‘Keeping Up With The Joneses’ Over Suburban Spy Antics’

The most popular movie on Netflix currently is Back in Action, featuring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as retired spies who are pulled back into espionage despite seeking a quiet domestic lifestyle. The film cleverly juxtaposes normal suburban life with high-action spy adventures. This shouldn’t be confused with Apple’s Ghosted, in which regular guy Chris Evans is unwittingly entangled in espionage with his girlfriend Ana de Armas, Amazon’s Role Play, with secret assassin Kaley Cuoco balancing family life with covert missions, or other streaming movies reminiscent of a more mature Spy Kids, including Netflix’s own Spy Kids adaptation from a few years back. Another example is Keeping Up with the Joneses, where a suburban couple played by Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher gets caught up in a spy conspiracy involving their undercover neighbors, portrayed by Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot.

While Keeping Up with the Joneses is an older film from 2016, predating the current streaming trend, it has found renewed success on Max, possibly due to its likeness to movies like Back in Action. Despite being a box office flop upon release, the film is now receiving attention and recognition for its quality content. Even with seasoned actors like Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx in movies like Back in Action, Keeping Up with the Joneses stands out for being a well-crafted, consistently entertaining action-comedy that wasn’t fully appreciated in its initial release.

Unlike many streaming action-comedies, films such as Back in Action have their shining moments, especially with the star power of actors like Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. However, Keeping Up with the Joneses is a standout example of a well-made and consistently funny piece of entertainment. In the movie, long-married couple Jeff (Galifianakis) and Karen (Fisher) find themselves intrigued by their new, seemingly glamorous neighbors Tim (Hamm) and Natalie (Gadot). Karen, feeling restless in her routine, begins to suspect that the neighbors are hiding something, and indeed they are – the Joneses lead a double life as covert operatives using their suburban cover as camouflage for their top-secret missions.

It probably seems easy enough to write most of the jokes from there: Galifianakis bumbles his way through some shoot-outs with non sequiturs, maybe Fisher screams or falls down, while Hamm and Gadot grow irritated. But in the hands of director Greg Mottola, all four leads have a casually funny, character-based chemistry, and even the silliest moments (Tim and Jeff bonding over “snake wine”; Karen getting hit with a knockout dart while sneaking around the Joneses’ home) feel true to who they are, not entirely driven by a minimum antics requirement.

Part of this, I think, is because the movie clearly seems designed as a comedy-first enterprise. A lot of streaming-action comedies dart back and forth between the two genres so frantically that the jokes sound like half-assed improv and the action looks like half-assed animatics. Joneses, however, takes care to let each of its four major players, all ill-served by movies at various points in their careers, find what’s funny about their specific characters. This is particularly noticeable with Fisher, who could have been a screwball queen in another era: She plays Karen’s panicky side as a kind of frazzled excitability; you can’t tell if she’s using her suburban-mom façade to suppress her id, or if this is her way of expressing it. (She’s a master of screaming, in particular: She screams her lines just infrequently enough to get a jolting laugh out of it multiple times.) Just as funny, in its own way, is the offhand, more deadpan banter between Hamm and Gadot, balancing ruthless professionalism with the humanity just beneath their physically impressive surfaces. It makes such a difference in a movie where you’re supposed to see that funny contrast between stylized slickness and bumbling “reality,” which the streaming equivalents have blurred into a kind of sameness. Joneses pays attention to human details, rather than CG gunk; Mottola doesn’t seem like he’s performing an incompetent audition to direct a Tom Cruise movie.

This makes it all the more gratifying (and just plain shaming for a movie like Back in Action) that Mottola’s movie nevertheless looks better than a lot of “real” action movies. It was shot on actual celluloid, which was less unusual in 2016 but still not the norm, and you can absolutely tell: The colors and grain give it a warmer, less sitcom-lit look in both its suburban sequences and moodier night-set spycraft scenes. When there are action sequences, particularly a shoot-out/car chase around the midway point, they’re actually pretty well-staged for clarity and pacing, without forgetting the jokes. (As their car zooms through a puddle with henchmen’s guns blazing behind them, Fisher screams in displeasure that she’s getting wet.)

Look, Keeping Up with the Joneses isn’t a great movie. Mottola himself has made better ones like Superbad (a masterpiece within its aims), Adventureland (lovely), The Daytrippers (delightful), and his recent Hamm reunion Confess, Fletch (deserves many sequels). But after so many mediocre-or-worse action comedies about celebrities pretending to be spies pretending to be suburbanites, it looks increasingly rock solid. Maybe next time a streamer has the impulse to hand $100 million over to a movie where, say, Chris Pine and Rachel McAdams have to shoot people during marriage counseling or something, they could just hand some of that money over to Greg Mottola instead, and reasonably expect a comedy that also looks like a real movie.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.