Keeping Up With the Joneses

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Keeping Up With the Joneses
Starring Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot
Directed by Greg Mottola

The Story:
Ordinary suburban couple Jeff (Zach Galifianakis) and Karen (Isla Fisher) Gaffney live the ideal life.  Jeff is a human resources director at a government agency, and Karen is an interior decorator.  They live in the picture-perfect cul de sac with personable neighbors and everything is as Americana as it can get.  Then they get new neighbors Tim (Jon Hamm) and Natalie (Gal Gadot) Jones, and immediately Karen suspects they're not who they say they are.  After some amateur sleuthing, Karen learns that the Joneses aren't who they appear to be, and she inadvertently pulls both herself and Jeff into the world of international espionage, as the Joneses recruit them to locate a man named the Scorpion who wants microchips that could threaten national security. 

The Synopsis:
Previews for the movie show a laugh-out-loud action comedy featuring four of the hottest actors in Hollywood.  Unfortunately, it was one of those cases where all the best parts of the film were in the trailer.  The premise was something that has been done in the past, and what was delivered was pretty much any spy movie of the same vein, with the same old, outdated jokes and the typical Hollywood ending.

Quite unfortunate, since the two pairings of Galifianakis/Fisher and Hamm/Gadot seemed like surefire things.  Both pairs have incredible chemistry with one another as well as the other pair, and it appeared that everyone was having a blast filming, so that was a plus for the film.  They all gave great performances, but it was ultimately the dulled-down script that hindered the film from becoming a knockout comedy caper. 

There won't be any point in spoiling anything, because it seriously was so typical that you could tell where the story was going twenty minutes before it happened, and I often found myself getting so bored I was looking through my phone during the movie.  It didn't really stimulate anything in my brain, and with a few glimmers of hope (such as the car chase scene and the impeccable Isla Fisher doing some hilarious physical comedy), but ultimately it all fell flat in a poorly executed paint-by-numbers film that you'll forget about a few minutes after seeing it.

The Summary:
Even though the film boasts a terrific cast who works well off each other, ultimately the biggest fault in "Keeping Up With the Joneses" falls with the script, which was about as cookie-cutter as anything you'd find on basic television.

The Score: C+

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