[5]Faith-Family Film Review: The Spy Next Door
By Catholic Office of Film and Broadcasting [6]
The Spy Next Door—Generally good-hearted but thin martial-arts comedy in which an undercover spy (Jackie Chan) posing as a mild-mannered pen salesman is left in charge of his divorced girlfriend’s (Amber Valletta) three kids (Madeline Carroll, Will Shadley and Alina Foley), even as he works to thwart the evil schemes of a Russian criminal (Magnus Scheving) bent on cornering the international petroleum market. Director Brian Levant’s family-oriented offering — which also features country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and comedian George Lopez as Chan’s CIA colleagues — while sketchy, is mostly free of worrisome content and charts its central character’s self-sacrificing efforts to protect the youngsters and win their trust, but scenes of hand-to-hand combat makes it unsuitable for the smallest viewers and brief interludes of mildly risque humor further restrict its appropriate audience. Considerable, though nongraphic martial arts violence, acceptability of divorce, some vaguely sexual humor, at least one crude term. A-II — adults and adolescents. (PG) 2010 Full Review [7]