tek's rating:

Spies in Disguise (PG)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 2019, but I didn't see it until 2024. It was the last movie produced by Blue Sky Studios, and the next to last movie to be released by 20th Century Fox before the studio's name was changed to 20th Century Studios, after its acquisition by Disney. The movie is completely redonkulous, but a lot of fun.

It begins with a boy named Walter Beckett creating a gadget to keep his mother, a cop, safe while at work. He's upset about other kids calling him weird, but his mom assures him that weird is a good thing, and someday his gadgets will be used to protect the world.

Flash forward 14 years. There's a super spy named Lance Sterling (Will Smith), who goes on a mission to recover a stolen attack drone from an arms dealer named Kimura (Masi Oka). Lance's boss, Joy Jenkins (Reba McEntire), warns him not to make a move until backup arrives, but Lance ignores her. Kimura sells the drone to a mysterious man with a robotic hand (Ben Mendelsohn), but Lance manages to retrieve it from him, and take it back to his agency. He stops by the gadgets department to complain to Walter (now an adult voiced by Tom Holland) about one of his devices not doing what it was supposed to. Walter insists on creating non-lethal gadgets, which irritates Lance, who ends up firing Walter. Then Lance brings the case containing the drone to Director Jenkins, but it turns out the case is empty, and "Robo-Hand" still has the drone. (Incidentally, I should say Wikipedia calls the villain "Killan", but that's not a name I ever heard in the movie, so I'm just going to call him "Robo-Hand", like Lance did.) An Internal Affairs agent named Marcy Kappel (Rashida Jones) believes Lance stole the device himself, because there's video of him having done so. But Lance insists the man with the robo-hand had somehow scanned his face to impersonate him. Marcy doesn't buy it, so Lance escapes from headquarters and goes on the run.

He goes to Walter's house hoping Walter can help him disappear, and while there unwittingly drinks an invention of Walter's that looks like a glass of water. This has the effect of transforming Lance into a pigeon. Walter says it will take some time to develop an antidote to make him human again, and in the meantime the two of them pay a visit to Kimura to learn where they could find Robo-Hand. They learn that he's planning to steal data on all of the spies in Lance's agency, to target with the drone and kill them. So Lance and Walter have to work together to stop Robo-Hand, all the while being pursued by Marcy and a couple of other agents called Eyes (Karen Gillan) and Ears (DJ Khaled).

For most of the movie, Lance just finds Walter annoying (and often calls him by the wrong name), but over time he comes to realize Walter can actually be helpful, and to care about him. Eventually Lance does become human again, and Marcy learns that he was telling the truth about Robo-Hand, so they work together to try to thwart his evil plan. That's pretty much all I can say about the plot. (I won't spoil how it ends.) But I thought it was a fairly amusing movie, and pretty cool. Oh, and I forgot to mention the heroes get some help from a few other (real) pigeons. And... I kind of admire Walter's determination to avoid killing bad guys, which in real life I suppose isn't always possible. But in this movie it is, because his gadgets, as weird as they are, are pretty amazing. (And in real life, even Lance's normal mode of operation wouldn't work like it does in the movie, so... it's not much more of a stretch for Walter's methods to work, as well.)


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