Review

Keeping Up With the Jones

Jeff (Zach Galifianakis) has suspicions about his new neighbors in Greg Mottola’s comedy Keeping Up With the Joneses.
Jeff (Zach Galifianakis) has suspicions about his new neighbors in Greg Mottola’s comedy Keeping Up With the Joneses.

It's easy to speculate our neighbors may be up to something dire once they enter their own homes. Our imaginations can lead to some really scary conclusions that have no basis in reality. It's tempting to wish that screenwriter Michael LeSieur had used more of his when he wrote Keeping Up With the Joneses.

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Jeff (Zach Galifianakis) and Karen Gaffney (Isla Fisher) find their domestic tranquility disturbed when a glamorous couple move in next door in Keeping Up With the Joneses.

Perhaps he did in rejected drafts of the script, but the final film plays like a watered-down version of Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws. Despite featuring a capable troupe of performers, neither LeSieur nor director Greg Mottola (the far more amusing Superbad and Adventureland) can maximize the potential of having covert operatives infiltrating and potentially endangering a staid cul-de-sac.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

79 Cast: Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot, Matt Walsh, Patton Oswalt, Maribeth Monroe, Kevin Dunn

Director: Greg Mottola

Rating: PG-13, for sexual content, action/violence and brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Jeff and Karen Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher) often seem a little too set in their suburban ways. She's an interior designer currently toiling on less than promising projects, and he's the head of human resources at a company where he gets little respect. His attempts to settle work-space conflicts with bureaucratic psychobabble are expectedly ineffective, and the only reason any of his co-workers, who also live in his neighborhood, talk to him at all is so that they can use his computer to play fantasy football and search for porn.

It might be helpful to explain that Jeff works for a defense contractor, and he's the only employee in the building who has unfettered internet access. Considering how lightly everyone at Jeff's firm seems to take security, it's hard not to be suspicious when Tim and Natalie Jones (Jon Hamm and moonlighting Wonder Woman Gal Gadot) buy a house in the neighborhood sight unseen.

Unlike his neighbors, Tim has a seemingly exciting career as a travel writer, replete with hair-raising tales from his remote stops. Roughly half the age of most adult females in the neighborhood, Natalie enjoys wearing slight but flattering outfits and demonstrating an unexpected athleticism.

Both of the Joneses start peppering Jeff and Karen with personal questions, and Karen, who's fearful by nature, suspects that Tim and Natalie are in the cul-de-sac under false pretenses.

Keeping Up With the Joneses might have been more enjoyable if alert viewers couldn't guess what's actually happening with the title characters before Karen and Jeff do. If the story moved as stealthily as real spies are supposed to, the plot twists would have been more surprising and funny.

As he demonstrated on Mad Men, Hamm can be suave and scary simultaneously, and Gadot seems right at home beating up antagonists.

LeSieur might have come up with more successful gags if he did more to contrast the insular world of the Gaffneys and the duplicitous world of the Joneses instead of coming up with tepid action scenes.

Watching Fisher losing her composure is funny, but the material does no favors for Galifianakis. He's at his best when he plays characters who have long lost their sanity. As a normal, if clueless, person, he's just not as funny. Mottola and LeSieur can't decide if he's an innocent or a buffoon. As a result, it's hard to care if he emerges from the Joneses' invasion alive.

MovieStyle on 10/21/2016

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