Rather like the studio horror movie, the bar for the action comedy has lowered so dramatically that the mere act of not tripping over it headfirst is now considered enough. Modeled after an old-fashioned, something-for-him and something-for-her date-night formula, they tend to involve attractive stars smugly quipping at each other while sleekly avoiding pop-soundtracked gunfire, all theoretically allowing for the opportunity to show off dual personas, class clown and jock rolled into one.
But the magic that was on display in 2005’s magnetic Mr & Mrs Smith, a film that has arguably had the most visible, and damaging, impact on the genre in the almost two decades since (itself heavily in debt to 1994’s True Lies), has been almost entirely absent in its many imitators. Last year’s hauntingly awful Chris Evans-Ana de Armas starrer Ghosted acted as an almost instructive what-not-to-do, a punishing, unintentional parody of what these films have become in a year in which there seemed to be more of them than ever before. To kick off the new year with yet another – male-female pairing: check; one of them is a spy/assassin: check – is not the most thrilling prospect but with many, many more to come in the next 12 months (Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz in Back in Action, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy, Donald Glover’s Mr & Mrs Smith TV series), it’s about finding the silver lining where possible.
