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I Spy is Max Allan Collins’s 2002 novelization of the Eddie Murphy / Owen Wilson buddy-action film of the same name, a contemporary update of the 1965 Bill Cosby / Robert Culp TV series. Kelly Robinson, a heavyweight boxing champion, is recruited by reluctant BNS field agent Alex Scott to help recover a stolen stealth fighter prototype called the Switchblade from arms dealer Arnold Gundars in Budapest. The plot is exactly what the film delivers; the prose Collins adds is the Robinson interiority and the Hungary travel material the screenplay does not have room for.
Collins is one of the best novelization writers of his generation (Saving Private Ryan, Air Force One, the U.S. Marshals movie tie-in), and I Spy reads like a working professional turning in clean work. Robinson’s first-person interludes have an actual voice rather than the boilerplate movie-tie-in narration the genre usually settles for, and the Budapest sequences benefit from the prose space the film’s editing cut down. The Owen Wilson voice is harder to transcribe than the Murphy one. The plot, as in the film, is the weakest element.
Best for readers who liked the I Spy film and want the slightly fuller version, and for anyone looking for books like I Spy in the early-2000s buddy-action novelization tradition. Three stars, with Collins’s prose chops earning the rating.
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