Sometimes studio films arrive without the rich, yet subtle new car smell of a clever, carefully finessed movie. Such is "Keeping Up With the Joneses," a mood-swinging action spoof poorly balancing a bromantic comedy and a romantic one. It conjures up the scent of rancid products from a mediocre sausage factory. Or Adam Sandler's production company.
It offers the promise of good-looking people (Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot as sexy superspies) looking good and funny people (Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher as their suburban neighbors) acting funny. But it delivers a uniquely charmless concoction that should not be sampled without a clothespin on the nose.
The premise is overfamiliar from high-concept farces like "Spys" and "Central Intelligence." A timid office worker is pulled into the world of international intelligence across a target range of ridiculous yet bland gunplay. The adventure that follows is just what the wallflower has been craving, even if he doesn't quite realize it yet.
Galifianakis plays Jeff Gaffney, a human resources specialist at a high-tech corporation that creates mysterious, top-secret widgets for the government. Jeff isn't respected by his work colleagues. His home life in a claustrophobic cul-de-sac is also a little bumpy. His wife Karen (Fisher) expresses terminal boredom with married life. While their kids are away to summer camp, she uses her career as an interior designer to push computer images of bathroom urinals this way and that.
The excitement they lack arrives in the form of two attractive, highly intelligent newcomers, Tim and Natalie Jones (Hamm and Gadot). While Jeff is delighted by their friendly attention, Karen's suspicious nature turns her into a sleuth, discovering that they are CIA types who moved next door intentionally. Cue tedious rounds of generic window-smashing and car-crashing, the dynamic duo in control as the harmless pair flinch to the side and shriek hysterically for their lives.
Director Greg Mottola, whose 2007 hit "Superbad" put a fresh spin on teenage sex comedies, does visually undistinctive work here that is strictly amateur. Part of the fault surely rests with the arrested-development screenplay by Michael LeSieur. With the tempo shifting from snail's pace to overdrive, the mismatched buddies confess to one another that they sometimes hate their jobs, but develop no harmony. The same can be said of the women, though they do exchange the now obligatory comic lesbian lip lock.
Considering the lack of chemistry in those relationships, it's not surprising that there's none in the casting, either. Hamm's career seems to have hit a plateau where the man who was impossible to resist on TV for almost a decade is intermittently interesting in film. Galifianakis plays his part deadpan to excess, as meek onscreen as his tedious character is in life. Fisher and Gadot are easy on the eyes but nothing more. Each offers a game performance but without a sharp script feeding them comedy, there is nothing intrinsically hilarious about them.
The film sporadically comes alive when Patton Oswalt, genuinely entertaining as the master spy Scorpion, bounces into the shooting gallery. Movie geeks will appreciate the casting. Oswalt generally plays harmless fellows (as in "Young Adult," "Ratatouille" and "Big Fan"), a type that he delights here in spoofing. He plays the wack-job role seriously, the best way to light a firecracker string of laughs. There is very little snap and sizzle in the film otherwise.
