'I Spy' another TV adaptation - and another flop

Oh joy, just what we needed -- another uninspired, underwhelming and overblown classic-TV knockoff splatter-painted together with respectable stars and a big budget. Call me crazy, but I'm starting to think that those crackpot writers over in Tinseltown are running pretty low on ideas. \n"I Spy," the latest in the long, sad line of TV-shows-turned big-screen-clunkers, should really only be called an adaptation based on its name and its overall theme. While most people consider Bill Cosby and Robert Culp's TV "I Spy" to be a groundbreaking, stylish, first-rate series, Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy's pedestrian revisiting is nothing more than a splotchy, passé and teasingly inconsistent dud with two stars who should have known better.\nContrary to the original (which pitted spy Cosby with tennis star Culp), the film tells the story of a boxer, Kelly Robinson (Murphy), who is recruited by President Bush to help second-rate secret agent Alex Scott (Wilson) recover a stolen spy plane from the "evildoer" Gundars (an uninspired Malcolm McDowell). And that's pretty much the extent of it.\nApparently, even with a team of four screen writers, the best anybody could muster was this lame collection of painful action sequences and howling buddy-flick clichés. What's more, the bad action and story are all the more difficult to watch while trying to wait for the next dialogue scene, where the two comedians can start riffing away from the lousy script and actually garner some hearty laughs from the audience.\nWhen it's funny, it really works and everyone begins to laugh all the stupidity of the film away, but, sadly, it's only really funny for maybe four of its fidgety 96 minutes. It almost feels like the writers and director forgot why people were at the movie in the first place. Nobody wants to see horrifically staged action and cheap explosions; they want to see Wilson and Murphy do what they do best.\nYou know, it's kind of sad when I think about it. There are some really funny parts in this movie, and the hints of what could have been flutter away with every stretched-out bit of action between them. Let's only hope that one of these days we'll get past this notion that the only way to sell tickets is to use a name people recognize.