The teaming of Kathleen Turner with the cockily charming Dennis Quaid is theoretically an attractive proposition, but confidence wanes the instant this caper's horribly cutesy animated title credits start to roll. The foreboding is throughly warranted, for this is a throwback to 60s spy spoofs in which James Coburn or Dean Martin gallivanted around sipping cocktails, getting laid and foiling ludicrous conspiracies.
As it's now the 90s, however, our secret agent double act, Jeff and Jane Blue may be into drinking and screwing, but they are on maternity leave in New Orleans to bond with their newborn baby as well as romp round the bedroom and swap smart-alec banter in picturesque Big Easy locales. Suddenly they are redrafted in to snare an old adversary, ex-Commie agent Novacek (Shaw) who's entered into the capitalist free-market spirit by selling weapons to terrorists.
This desperately wants to be a witty sophisticated update of The Thin Man crossed with The Avengers, but it is almost unremittingly sophomoric, and while Herbert Ross directs with some panache, his grip has loosened since his heyday with Neil Simon (California Suite, The Goodbye Girl). Turner and Quaid have little chemistry together and, worse, both are guilty of smug overplaying. They should have taken a tip from Stanley Tucci, in a running gag as a bungling but persistent mugger, whose pratfalls and high-pitched screams are executed as if in earnest. Ergo, he and he alone is the only faintly amusing element in this entire insufferably overconfident farce.