January Entertainment: The Spy Next Door

Comments (0) By Melissa Anderson Tuesday, Jan 12 2010

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The Spy Next Door
Directed by Brian Levant
Lionsgate
Opens January 15

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Like director Brian Levant's last two outings—2002's Snow Dogs, 2005's Are We There Yet?—The Spy Next Door is immediately forgettable family entertainment, suitable for release only in the dung-heap month of January. Jackie Chan, game as ever, stars as Bob Ho, an undercover CIA agent from China posing as a sweater-vested pen importer who offers to mind the three kids (roughly 13, nine, and four) of his Albuquerque next-door-neighbor sweetheart, Gillian (Amber Valletta), while she's away in Denver. When not preparing breakfast or shuttling his obnoxious new charges to school, Bob must also face Russian baddies hatching a petroleum plot, George Lopez as a mole, and, most alarmingly, CIA colleague Billy Ray Cyrus's bizarre, shellacked, middle-parted shag. Still immensely affable and eager, the aging action hero (Chan has two stunt doubles) seems not to mind the humiliation of sharing most of the movie with his exhaustingly hammy half-pint co-stars or the unnecessary ESL cruelty: After apologizing to Cyrus's character for suspecting him in the plot, Bob is told, "Don't worry about it, buddy; chalk it up to the language barrier." The end-credits blooper reel reveals Chan blurting out, "I hate English!"