Mark Reviews Movies: MY SPY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 25, 2020

There's the sweet and family-friendly side of My Spy, in which a tough CIA operative learns to get in touch with his feelings with the help of a precocious kid and the kid's mother, and there's the demented side to the movie, in which the spy, when he isn't enacting actual violence, bonds with the kid by teaching her in terms of violence. It's a strange combination that might have worked if the movie didn't open with the hero killing a bunch of anonymous goons, before we see a replay of the killings. In the replay, a severed head spins through the air.

The problem here isn't the pleasant stuff. It isn't the twisted and violent stuff, either. It's distinctly the combination of the two or, more specifically, how director Peter Segal seems incapable of realizing that the two modes clash in such an off-putting way.

The point, perhaps, is that you can have a light-hearted comedy in which there's the obvious suggestion of the hero's propensity for and skill at killing people. You can have a movie that focuses on that hero's expertise in violence with as much blood and gore as possible, while offering some kind of underlying story thread that serves as a counterpoint. To be fair, there isn't much blood or any disgusting gore in this movie (Again, there is a severed head flying through the air, though, played as a gag), but there is a sort of carefree attitude about violence that's about equal in terms of offsetting the movie's desire to be a goofy, cute, and good-natured comedy.

After the bullet-happy and explosion-filled introduction to JJ (Dave Bautista), our spy, he's chewed out at CIA headquarters for allowing a plutonium core to escape into the world. His boss (played by Ken Jeong) gives JJ and us the rundown: A murderous terrorist with aims at a nuclear weapon wants the radioactive material. Because of his earlier failure, JJ is assigned to keep tabs on the Chicago-based widow of the terrorist's brother, whom the villain killed, instead of doing the exciting work of tracking down the bad guy before he can get the plutonium.

The central premise here is that Sophie (Chloe Coleman), the daughter of the terrorist's dead brother, catches on to the spy games being played by JJ and tech expert Bobbi (Kristen Schaal). She makes the CIA man a deal: If he teaches her how to be a spy, Sophie won't tell the agency how badly JJ has mucked up this assignment.

This is an amusing setup, and it's helped by the casting of Bautista, whose charm and deadpan comedic chops are as imposing as his hulking frame, and Coleman, who plays the kid as cunning and with some considerable vulnerability. The connective tissue between the characters is surprisingly sound: They're both lonely. JJ is a military veteran who swore off personal relationships after a disastrous mission and a failed marriage engagement. Sophie is the new kid in town, and her outsider status, her cleverness, and her obvious desire to make friends hasn't won her any.

Sophie, extorting the spy to participate in social activities (e.g., a trip to the ice-skating rink and a bring-your-parent-to-school day), shows JJ that there's more to life than spying and killing and insisting on being alone. It helps that she's trying to set him up with her lovely mother Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), and there is a real sweetness to the spy falling into a kind of domestic ideal, even though he doesn't have that experience (He makes protein shakes as an impromptu dinner).

Meanwhile, JJ teaches the kid how to beat a polygraph test, the art of distraction, and a unique way of doing division—by having her imagine two spies splitting up the killing of a group of bad guys. With JJ's mere presence, Sophie becomes instantly popular at school, which says more about the malleable whims of children than any kind of obvious change to Sophie's character. She doesn't need to change, obviously, but it certainly seems as if she's nabbing the short straw in this deal.

The screenplay by brothers Erich and Jon Hoeber almost finds a balance between the sweet and the demented in this middle section, because it leans into the former while occasionally joking in the vein of the latter. The gag that JJ is set in his ways as a man who can only think in terms of violence makes for a nice change of character—when he starts seeing that there's more to the world—and a wicked edge to the humor that keeps it from becoming too juvenile (i.e., a lot of slapstick and a couple scenes of JJ dancing to the confusion of others).

Beneath all of this, though, are the mechanics of a plot that's leading things down a familiar and inevitably violent path. Does My Spy need to go in that direction? Based on the movie the filmmakers have made, it does. Does the movie actually have to go in that direction? That's a more existential question, which would require a complete re-tooling of the material and a lot of re-thinking about tone on the part of the filmmakers. As for a quick answer, they made this movie instead.

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