Review: Keeping Up with the Joneses
How perfect are the Joneses? Natalie (Gal Gadot) is leggy and gorgeous, a social media editor and food blogger who also works with a charity that helps Sri Lankan children. Tim (Jon Hamm) is Hollywood handsome, a travel writer who learned his glass-blowing hobby during a trip in Hungary. They're stylish, accomplished, and very much in love. No wonder everyone in the cul-de-sac hates them.
Well, not quite everyone. Jeff Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis) is an affable HR manager for a high-profile aeronautics corporation who develops an instant man-crush on the manly Tim. Jeff's wife Karen (Isla Fisher), suffering from empty nest syndrome with their two boys at summer camp and whiling away her time sifting through urinal designs for her latest interior decorating assignment, is a bit more wary of the genetically blessed couple. Her suspicions are stoked when she finds Tim snooping in Jeff's den during a barbecue held at the Gaffneys. Looking for a little adventure, she decides to do a little investigating of her own.
"Oh, they're just gamers," Jeff says when Karen discovers a room full of high-tech computer equipment in Tim and Natalie's home. Of course they aren't, the Joneses are undercover operatives whose latest mission involves ferreting out the employee who has been using Jeff's work computer to sell classified information to a mysterious figure named The Scorpion. The reveal can't come soon enough because once the Gaffneys find themselves smack dab in the middle of the genuinely married spies' mission, the film's pacing - which had been a bit slack and lackluster - finally locks into a consistently entertaining groove.
The film's first and best action set piece - a car chase that has the quartet dodging armed motorcyclists - is enlivened by the Gaffneys' rising panic at their first brush with peril. Whether it's Jeff asking for the air conditioner to be turned on so he can calm down or Karen negotiating a cookie split between her two sons over the phone whilst ducking the latest spray of bullets, the sequence, their anxiety contrasted with the Joneses' unflappability ensures plenty of guffaws.
Meanwhile, Natalie's exasperation at their cover being blown ("Ten years, 30 countries, we can't even last a week in suburbia!"), along with having to deal with Jeff's more empathetic torturing tactics ("Let's just waterboard him and get it over with."), and learning of Tim's dissatisfaction with being a spy allows Gadot to be both a badass and display comic skills heretofore unseen. Her fembot figure and cool persona play nicely off of Fisher's curviness and almost maniacal perkiness. Fisher also gets a chance to display her talent for physical comedy, flailing her body into all manner of pratfalls but also making a simple thing like fast walking elicit a chuckle or two.
Galifianakis and Hamm make for a very good bromantic pair, bonding over indoor skydiving and snake wine-fueled dinners (during which a snake's head hilariously latches on to Jeff's hand). In many ways, Galifianakis is the quiet center of this film, creating a character who truly wants to help people but whose efforts actually produce mass irritation instead. The ever-game Hamm is a delight with Tim essentially being a sneak peek at what Bond would be like with Hamm assuming the role.
Keeping Up with the Joneses
Directed by: Greg Mottola
Written by: Michael LeSieur
Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Jon Hamm, Isla Fisher, Gal Gadot, Patton Oswalt, Matt Walsh, Maribeth Monroe
