Metacritic reviews

TV's ''I Spy'' knew how to swing. The movie 'I Spy knows only how to scramble and string together moments of Murphy braggadocio and Wilson stoner-ocity, and the sweat shows.

It's precisely the lineup of familiar past work that makes I Spy pretty dull goods, invigorated mainly by the sharp interplay between Murphy and Wilson, both of whom shine best when they have a sidekick to work with.

The real problem with the new film, however, is a certain lack of chemistry between the leads; Wilson is game, as always, but his part is seriously underwritten, and while Murphy raises trash talking to the level of a fine art, he seems to be operating in another movie altogether.

The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.

I cry for I Spy— or I would if this latest and laziest imaginable of all vintage-TV spinoffs were capable of engendering an emotional response of any kind. Comas are physical, not emotional.

The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.

Something lazy, slow, shallow, stupid, amateurish, unfunny, unsuspenseful, uninformed, unspeakably dull and witlessly written, directed and acted (the special effects suck, too).

Exhausts you with its derivative stupidity, leaving you weak and bored and weary of comedy that's not funny, action that's not exciting, dialogue that's not clever. It's not even an adequate rip-off of the TV show.

Hollywood's Thanksgiving turkey arrives today - 27 days early - in the gobbling guise of the heavily hyped, brain-dead comedy, I Spy.

Nothing is real, but at the same time, nothing is fake. Nothing is, period. You don't believe a second of it for a second, so banal and predictable is it.