Andrew Scott, Kyle Chandler and Glenn Close also star in Seth Gordon’s caper about a pair of retired undercover agents dragged back into the spy game along with their unknowing children.

It’s probably premature to say Netflix has finally started finding its groove with mainstream popcorn features, but after Rebel Ridge and Carry-On delivered muscular B-movie entertainment, Back in Action provides similar throwback pleasures, albeit in a family-friendly comedic vein. Seth Gordon is more of a journeyman than either Jeremy Saulnier or Jaume Collet-Serra, the genre-savvy directors of those recent stablemates. But he gets the job done and keeps the wheels spinning, partly by peppering the action with enough vehicular chases and physical clashes to fuel three movies. A bigger factor, however, is the reunion of Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, as romantic leads with nimble fight skills.

The movie is a return of a different kind for Foxx, who was hospitalized in Atlanta near the end of the shoot for an undisclosed medical emergency. He later revealed in his 2023 Netflix special Jamie Foxx: What Happened Was… that he had suffered a life-threatening stroke requiring months of physical therapy to relearn basic motor skills. Fans of both actors should be delighted to see them again, not just bantering but doing most of their own stunts.

Movies like this — starry, frothy, cute, harmless — used to turn up regularly at the multiplex. They now occupy a shrinking part of the landscape in the post-Marvel era, as studios have intensified their focus on high-yield franchises. If this is the streaming universe’s attempt to fill that gap, with marquee talent serving as a distraction from often preposterous plotting and an over-qualified supporting cast to class it up, we could do worse.

Gordon winks at the James Bond model in an action-packed opening sequence that introduces undercover CIA operatives Matt (Foxx) and Emily (Diaz) 15 years earlier, not long into their romantic relationship, just as Emily discovers she’s pregnant.

Agency handler Chuck (Kyle Chandler) dispatches them to crack the safe of Eastern European terrorist Balthazar Gor (Robert Besta) and get hold of a master-key capable of crashing or controlling any system in the world. Matt and Emily are unarmed when the alarm is triggered and in what becomes a running theme, the pair must improvise to fend off Gor’s thugs with whatever objects are at hand, along with their impressive fist- and footwork.

Jumping ahead to the present, Matt and Emily are living an everyday family life, raising two children — sullen 14-year-old Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her brother Leo (Rylan Jackson), who’s 11 — in the squeaky-clean suburbs of an unnamed American city.

Frustrated by Alice’s increasing hostility toward her, Emily starts to suspect she’s lying about study evenings at a friend’s house. This prompts both parents to resort to old spy tactics, resulting in an amusingly messy intervention during which their spontaneous badassery startles their mortified daughter. Matt attempts to shrug off her questions about their physical prowess: “We took a couple taekwondo lessons.”

When one of Alice’s friends posts video of the incident online, Matt and Emily’s cover is blown. Chuck turns up at their door, revealing that the master-key was never recovered from the scene of the plane crash, and if he managed to track them down so easily it won’t be long before Gor’s goon squad does the same.