MY SPY: THE ETERNAL CITY - Mark Reviews Movies

My Spy: The Eternal City, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 17, 2024

The problem with the original My Spy was its inconsistent tone. The setup was a mostly family-friendly idea, in which a CIA agent bonds with a girl who discovers his undercover mission, but then, there was the surprisingly violent nature of the plot surrounding that story. The clash gave the material an uncomfortably nasty edge, and if there's one thing to say about co-writer/director Peter Segal's follow-up My Spy: The Eternal City, it's that the filmmakers have corrected that dissonant approach.

However, they've done so by sticking to the more obvious and lazier path. After some pleasantries surrounding CIA man JJ (Dave Bautista) acclimating to a new life out of the field and trying to focus on becoming a father to the girl, the sequel becomes a pretty straightforward thriller that forgoes comedy for action and the family dynamic for a race-against-the-clock plot involving about a hundred nuclear weapons. It's wasting a premise that might not be unique—or good, for that matter—but definitely could possess more promise than the formulaic result we get here.

It is somewhat enjoyable to see how these two characters have changed in the proceeding years. JJ, for example, has taken his role as legal guardian to Sophie (Chloe Coleman) seriously, giving up field work with the agency for a behind-the-scenes role, lest anything happen to him. Bautista remains a compelling and contradictory screen presence in his performance here. This is a man who looks as if he could pummel anyone who gets in his way with ease, but there's a gentleness underneath that hulking physique and tough-guy attitude. Watching JJ cook for Sophie while her mother is away for work (a good way to get around an actor not returning, possibly) and hearing him say that he just wants to live long enough to watch her walk down the aisle are as genuine as all of the fighting the character has to do.

Meanwhile, Sophie is a teenager in high school now, singing in the choir, having a crush on singer jock Ryan (Billy Barratt), and having a close friend in Collin (Taeho K), who clearly "like" likes her in the way she likes the other boy. Whatever cool factor Sophie might have thought JJ possessed has faded with age and proximity, because he's just an embarrassing father figure, trying to push his interests—namely physical training for tough situations—on her. There's an early sense that these characters and this relationship have evolved in the intermittent years.

As for what Segal and returning fraternal co-screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber do with this dynamic, the answer is not much. Soon enough, the plot kicks into gear, as Sophie's choir wins an opportunity to sing at the Vatican, JJ decides to take some time off to help chaperone the group, and a sinister scheme involving dastardly rogues gets closer and closer to the pair.

It features about a hundred nuclear weapons, hidden and subsequently lost following the fall of the Soviet Union, and the discovery of their whereabouts by a villain with a grudge against the CIA. In particular, the bad guys are targeting JJ's boss David (Ken Jeong), who's also Collin's father, although the kid thinks his dad is a nurse and not the head of CIA field operations. Collin is abducted by professional assassin Crane (Flula Borg), leading JJ, Sophie, and David to try to find him and stop whatever plan the villain has with those nuclear bombs.

It's all routine, with car chases and brawls and shootouts set against various Italian backdrops. The weirdest thing, perhaps, is how many comedic actors are present here. Some of them, like Jeong and Kristen Schaal as an expert agency analyst, have carried over from the first movie, but the sequel also introduces the likes of Anna Faris, Borg, and Craig Robinson. Such casting made sense in the original movie, since it was—or, at least, attempted to be—as much a comedy as it was an actioner.

In the follow-up, though, the material is mostly approached seriously, aside from some oddly comic bits (a flock of weaponized finches at an MI6 safe house, for example). That means we're left with a fairly sizeable group of funny people playing it straight, with only some one-liners reminding us of the movie's origin and that the filmmakers at least have some comedic intentions in the back of their minds. The sequel's shift in intentions, though, is only made more noticeable by the casting.

Is the idea here that, like Sophie, the conceit and the audience have grown up over the course of the four years between these movies? That might be an argument, except that the first movie's sometimes-uncomfortable merging of disparate tones and goals meant this was never really material for kids in the first place. Whatever the case for the change may be, My Spy: The Eternal City has chosen its course, which is a slight relief that's wholly undermined by how predictable and dull that direction turns out to be.

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