All spyed out

Back in the Sixties, a TV series casting a black star (Bill Cosby) with a white one (Robert Culp) in an espionage caper was cutting edge stuff. Nowadays, it's just cliche-fodder.

Eye Spy, a life-expired entity seeking resurrection as a franchise, stars the blabbermouth Eddie Murphy, emoting like a castrated cockerel to his own vanity as an over-endowed worldchamp boxer - the old tennisstar role in the TV series probably now thought to lack machismo - while doubling as a secret agent, and Owen Wilson as his heavy-lidded, laid-back sidekick.

The plot is unintelligible, the continuity is dreadful, the scripting is lazybones, the action is endless - through touristy Budapest, where the two blow up the steam baths in the baroque Gellert Hotel in their efforts to locate a stolen American spy plane that can turn invisible.

Malcolm McDowell, looking 90 and acting zero, stands about as a leading baddie. It all looks assembled from off-cuts of xXx, the Vin Diesel vehicle, which was itself a rip-off of Bond-type gizmo-laden juvenilia.

To freshen things up, there's a joke about "weapons of mass destruction" and a telephone call from one George W Bush recruiting the moronic Murphy to help fight "the evildoers". Columbia Pictures is doing its bit.

I Spy
Cert: cert12A