Keeping Up with the Joneses

The best word to describe “Keeping Up with the Joneses” is “tired”. The jokes, the premise, the action sequences are all tired and sitting in the theater, it made me tired. It’s not horrible, but it's a huge missed opportunity when you consider who is involved.

Jeff (Zach Galifianakis) and Karen Gaffney (Isla Fisher) are a boring suburban couple who suspect their new neighbors are not what they seem. Sure enough, after snooping into the home of Tim (John Hamm) and Natalie Jones (Gal Gadot), they discover that the over-achieving, too-good-to-be-true couple are spies!

I don’t really know what to say about “Keeping Up with the Joneses”. It’s basically everything I thought it was going to be. Doesn’t the plot seem awfully familiar? It’s the same boring couple we’ve seen in dozens of comedies, the one that desperately needs to re-ignite the spark in their marriage because as you know, all married couples have a joyless, sexless life, work boring jobs that they don’t really care for (or alternatively aren’t respected for) and desperately yearn for some Hollywood nonsense to come into their lives and jolt them awake. When the action comes in, it’s just exciting enough (in theory anyway) to get the audiences to cheer as stuff blows up, but you can tell it’s nothing inspired. From there, we have a bunch of contrived situations proving that Jeff and Karen are the dumbest people alive, the kind that have no poker face or acting prowess and are prone to shrieking like banshees the second something unexpected rears its head.

This picture is on autopilot the whole way. It’s the kind of film that had me clutching my sides tightly. Not because I was laughing hard, but because I was desperately trying to squeeze any chuckles out of my lungs. When I laughed at this film, it was for the stupidest reasons. Not any intentional jokes courtesy of the writer or director. For instance, I almost have to applaud the boneheaded decision by the writer to give Jeff and Karen 2 kids... and then have them absent from the whole movie. You see pictures of them in the house, but I couldn’t tell you which actors played them in fact, you never even hear their voices. You’ve heard of performers phoning it in, but at least in films like “Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World” Ricky Gervais provides his voice. In this film, the kids do not appear, not even as voices over the telephone!

On the upside, the film’s never painful to watch, it’s just kind of there. The actors are talented, even though the material they’re given isn’t great. However, the interactions they have with each other are fun. There are extended scenes where the men bond and the women also strike up a kind of friendship. I enjoyed those because they bring me to the best thing about this movie… which are Isla Fisher and Gal Gadot. Call me a pig, but Fisher appears in a white dress that shows off her cleavage and wow, she looks like a million, jillion dollars. If she's slumming it with Jeff, then surely I have a shot! Gal Gadot too, she’s one sexy lady. I don't stand a chance with her, but at least I can ogle her body. I just wish these talents were in a better film. I know this is a comedy and that real-world logic only loosely applies, but they don’t even try to explain some of the ridiculous developments that happen towards the tail end of the picture. Plus, it just isn’t all that funny.

I’ll have forgotten about “Keeping Up with the Jones” before the year is over. I’ll remember the chemistry between Zach Galifianakis and Jon Hamm, I’ll certainly have the images of Gal Gadot and Isla Fisher in their underwear memorized, but the rest is not the least bit noteworthy. (Theatrical version on the big screen, November 8, 2016)