I Spy: Critic Reviews

Unexceptional espionage comedy.

Just plain generic.

I cry for I Spy -- or I would if this latest and laziest imaginable of all vintage-TV spinoffs were capable of engendering an emotional response of any kind.

Moves at a glacial pace.

Banal and predictable.

For all its dopey shootouts and inept identity tweaks, nothing in this movie amounts to anything.

Though ample time is spent mingling Murphy's jabberjaw locutions and Wilson's curveball spaciness, the film leaves only the bitter reek of a botched chemistry experiment.

The jokes are flat, and the action looks fake.

The film hopes to emulate the frantic action of a good video game, but the best video games are carefully designed. I Spy, on the other hand, is a total wreck.

A casting disaster.

This is a remake by the numbers, linking a halfwit plot to a series of standup routines in which Wilson and Murphy show how funny they could have been in a more ambitious movie.

An overblown clunker full of bad jokes, howling cliches and by-the-numbers action sequences.

The execution is so dumbed-down, so dumbfounding, that sophisticated moviegoers might confuse it for outtakes from Spy Kids 2 and XXX.

... goes for the easy laugh rather than pushing in a new direction. It's a loosely constructed vehicle, probably on purpose.

As the latest bid in the TV-to-movie franchise game, I Spy makes its big-screen entry with little of the nervy originality of its groundbreaking small-screen progenitor.

The fights are poorly staged, the chases are boring -- and a series of crashes and explosions can't disguise that absolutely nothing of interest is going on for long stretches.

It won't be long before you'll spy I Spy at a video store near you.

The time has come to offer thanks to Owen Wilson.

Even the usually intense Malcolm McDowell doesn't have much spark: His main role is to press the remote control button that makes the stealth plane disappear and reappear, perhaps a foreshadowing of I Spy's cable-television future.

Loud, brash and obvious.

An unremarkable, modern action/comedy buddy movie whose only nod to nostalgia is in the title.

The action is reasonably well-done ... yet story, character and comedy bits are too ragged to ever fit smoothly together.

I Spy something lazy, slow, shallow, stupid, amateurish, unfunny, unsuspenseful, uninformed, unspeakably dull and witlessly written, directed and acted.