“Keeping Up with the Joneses” wants to be a spy thriller, a comedy of manners, and a suburban satire all at once. It mostly manages to be none of those things.
The 2016 film follows Jeff and Karen Gaffney, played by Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher, as they move into a cul-de-sac and start to suspect their new neighbors, Tim and Natalie Jones, are not what they seem. Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot play the Joneses as impossibly glamorous and impossibly friendly. The setup is simple and promising. The execution is not.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
The Setup That Promises More Than the Delivery Delivers
Jeff works at MBI, a defense contractor. His wife Karen notices Tim poking around their den at a block party, and later sees Natalie doing something that looks like a dead drop at a café. Karen follows Natalie to a mall dressing room, where Natalie defuses the situation with some female bonding. Later, Tim invites Jeff to an underground Chinese restaurant where he drinks snake wine and gets bitten by a severed snake head, which Tim saves him from. In exchange, Jeff takes Tim to indoor skydiving, a hobby of his that none of his friends share.
Throughout, Tim keeps trying to get Jeff to talk about his coworkers at MBI. Eventually, Tim and Natalie sneak into the building and look over Jeff’s emails. Back at home, Jeff accidentally breaks a glass sculpture given to them by Tim, revealing a bug among the shards. Karen realizes the Joneses are spies and decides to break into their house to find more evidence. She gets stunned by a pen gun, and they barely escape as the Joneses arrive.
Natalie worries Tim is getting too close to Jeff, but they reveal they are in love with each other.
“They lived a normal life… Until the Joneses moved in.”
The Cast and the Comedy That Misses
Galifianakis plays Jeff as nervous and unassuming, which works for the first half of the film. Fisher plays Karen as suspicious and capable, though her arc sputters. Hamm and Gadot are the film’s problem. They are supposed to be mysterious and dangerous, but they are also supposed to be charming and likable. The script cannot hold both readings at once, so they become cartoon villains instead of threats.
The supporting cast fares better. Patton Oswalt plays Bruce Springstein, code-named Scorpion, who shows up late in the film to explain things. Matt Walsh plays Dan Craverston, and Maribeth Monroe plays Meg Craverston. Kevin Dunn plays Carl Pronger, Jona Xiao plays Stacey Chung, Ming Zhao plays Scorpion’s girlfriend, Richard Regan Paul plays Sanjay, and Henry Boston plays Patrick Gaffney.
What Works and What Does Not
The film’s best moments are its visual jokes. The Joneses are absurdly perfect, and the film leans into that absurdity. A subplot involving Jeff’s friend Carl Pronger, who is obsessed with glassblowing, lands a few laughs. The scene where Jeff drinks snake wine and gets bitten is genuinely funny, even if the film does not know what to do with the bite afterward.
But the film loses focus in its middle stretch. The espionage plot grows increasingly complicated without ever becoming clear. Characters keep repeating information the audience has already heard, and the film never commits to its own tone. It is not a serious spy movie, but it is also not a broad comedy. It hovers between the two and lands on neither.
The Numbers Tell the Story
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” opened to $5,461,475 during its first week and grossed $29.9 million worldwide against a $40 million budget. It became a box office bomb.
The film’s failure is not surprising. A movie about suburban paranoia needs to build tension, and this one cannot. The Joneses are too polished to feel threatening, and the Gaffneys are too passive to feel threatened. The film’s central joke is that the Joneses are perfect, but it never explains why they are perfect. Their glassblowing and cooking blogs and travel writing feel like window dressing for a plot that never arrives.
The film’s final act rushes to a climax that feels rushed and undercooked. The resolution ties everything together, but it does not stick. The film ends without resolving the question of why the Joneses were watching Jeff in the first place, or what they wanted from him.
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” is a missed opportunity. It had a premise that could have been sharp and funny. Instead, it is a film that spends its runtime explaining itself and never finds its footing.
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