‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’ Review: Jon Hamm and Zach Galifianakis Waste Their Time, and Ours

Bad movies often get made with the best of intentions, and promising source material can go south for any number of reasons, but “Keeping Up with the Joneses” is so staggeringly mediocre and bereft of ideas that it seems impossible to believe that Jon Hamm, Zach Galifianakis, Gal Gadot, Isla Fisher and director Greg Mottola (“Adventureland”) went to work every day feeling anything but a gnawing sense of time being wasted.

Cinematically speaking, this is a large bowl of clear, unflavored gelatin; there may be nothing in it that’s actually harmful, but consuming it is an empty experience that offers no pleasure and no nourishment.

Jeff (Galifianakis) and Karen Gaffney (Fisher) are Atlanta suburbanites in a rut; they’ve just packed the kids off to summer camp, but they haven’t figured out any fun or sexy ways to take advantage of the fact that they’ve got the house to themselves.

Tim (Hamm) is a travel writer with anecdotes of adventures from around the globe, while Natalie Gadot, Batman v Superman:

Jeff and Karen are immediately dazzled by these newcomers; for all his talk about interpersonal relations as a human resources worker, Jeff doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends, so he’s delighted to bond with Tim.

Karen can’t help noticing that Tim seems a little nosy, and she starts doing some snooping herself, leading to the eventual discovery that the cul-de-sac’s new couple is actually a pair of spies with an interest in the aerospace company where Jeff works.

[...] come the car chases and the flying bullets and the exploding houses, and the sheer predictability of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” would be forgivable if it went even a little bit past the base expectations of a movie about the suburbs or spies.

[...] we get a film that thinks the word “urinal” is so hilarious that they trot it out every ten minutes, as well as a cloak-and-dagger plot so utterly by the numbers that viewers can follow it in their sleep, much like screenwriter Michael LeSieur (“You, Me and Dupree”) apparently did.