Peter Segal’s completely disposable 2020 action comedy My Spy was an entry into the microgenre featuring a strongman action star playing bodyguard to an irascible child. The film’s sequel, My Spy the Eternal City, embraces the equally hoary clichés of comedies revolving around stepparents, with Dave Bautista’s C.I.A. operative JJ adjusting to domesticity with the now-teenaged Sophie (Chloe Coleman) and her mother, Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), while struggling to relate to the girl as a parent and not merely a protector.
Naturally, JJ’s attempt to live a simpler life doesn’t last long, and when he elects to be a chaperone for Sophie’s choir on a trip to Italy, he finds himself embroiled in a convoluted scheme involving a terrorist plot after one of Sophie’s classmates, Collin (Taeho K)—who just so happens to be the son of JJ’s C.I.A. boss, David (Ken Jeong)—is abducted. Sophie, having trained with JJ to learn self-defense and surveillance techniques, also gets involved in trying to save her friend, something that her stepdad agrees to with a surprising lack of reluctance.
Your run-of-the-mill family-friendly spy comedy can get considerable mileage by playing off the cognitive dissonance of seeing a serious-minded, hulking action figure stomping around within what looks and feels like a kid’s movie. Here, though, the filmmakers cast the entire movie in the dour, low-lit grays that have become a staple of the contemporary action film, creating a mood of severity that hangs over even the most lighthearted moments. No less frustrating is how the jokiness of the script—co-written by Segal, Jon Hoeber, and Erich Hoeber—foils any attempts at positioning JJ as a consistent foil to Sophie and the other young characters.
Still, Bautista’s quick reflexes on comebacks and self-effacing befuddlement, honed through years of doing live character work in front of volatile wrestling audiences, pays dividends. My Spy the Eternal City’s action, typically setting JJ and Sophie on chases against terrorist henchman Crane (Flula Borg), fails to make any impression for being played too straight. And the ostensibly more experienced comedians regularly go too broad in the attempts for laughs, none worse than Jeong when David enters the film attempting to rescue his son. But where Jeong shouts and mewls in funny voices with no underlying punchline, Bautista works in a subtler register and even proves to be a good “yes, and” partner in character, playing up JJ’s genuine relationship with Sophie in how well he reacts to her conversational cues.
But despite such glimmers of charm, My Spy the Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support. And for a film that leans so heavily on a teenage girl proving an apt hand at clandestine fieldwork, it often reinforces some bafflingly retrograde views, from blasé gags about men’s discomfort with the very word “tampon” to the credence it lends JJ’s serious plea to Sophie to not “torture” Collin by friend zoning him. In a movie that already has so little memorable material, such clanging moments stick out all the more glaringly.
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