Movie Reviews

Owen Wilson plays a "special agent" named Alex Scott in I Spy (Scott is very excited about his job because it was only a few weeks ago that he was promoted up from a "regular agent").

Scott's latest mission involves the recovery of a top-secret prototype spy-plane that was recently stolen by a really bad dude named Arnold Gundars (Malcolom McDowell), who intends to auction it off to the highest bidder. The auction is being disguised by its organizers as a large party to be held in honour of a championship boxing match that is to occur the next day. Eddie Murphy plays one of the boxers, the "world champion" Kelly Robinson. Scott's spy agency recruits Robinson to help them infiltrate the party so they can find out where the plane is being kept, and then go and recover it.

The main point of this plot is to get Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy together into one of those "odd-couple buddy-movies" in which the two guys cannot seem to get along at first, but at the end they finally reconcile their differences, work together, and save the day. Unfortunately, even the two main actors (who are normally pretty good), can't do much to save this movie from mediocrity. For example, Owen Wilson is not at all believable as a "secret agent". That in itself, however, might've actually made for a funny comedy, if they'd gone more into the slapstick/sight-gag kind of humour that you might find in something like The Naked Gun series. Even worse is Eddie Murphy who, though having the occasional funny moment, comes across as way more 'annoying' than funny.

I've seen a lot of comedies that are worse than this one, but this still wasn't very good.