Item: My Spy The Eternal City
Rating: 6
Author: Alex Maidy

Plot: When Sophie’s high school choir is selected for an Italian tour culminating in a performance for the Pope in Vatican City, JJ sees this as an opportunity to bond with his new stepdaughter, so he volunteers to help chaperone the group through the Venetian canals, across Florence’s renowned bridges and into Rome’s most historic sites. Instead he finds that he and Sophie have become unwitting pawns in a terrorist plot that could end the world as we know it.

Review: My Spy originally debuted at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic after being pulled from release in August 2019. With mediocre reviews, the Dave Bautista-led action-comedy was solid family entertainment when audiences sorely needed new things to watch. Four years later, Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman have reunited for a sequel that is bigger and better than the original but still nowhere near as good as it should be. With a better villain and a more ambitious, globe-trotting plot, My Spy The Eternal City benefits from the chemistry between the two leads as it develops into a much different story than what we saw in the original. A more mature storyline focused on spycraft coupled with teenage drama makes for a funnier and more action-packed movie than the first.

In the 2020 film, Dave Bautista played JJ, a former Special Ops soldier turned CIA operative who botched his first mission. When his boss, David Kim (Ken Jeong), assigns JJ and tech specialist Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) to observe the wife and daughter of an arms dealer. The daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), quickly realizes JJ is a spy and blackmails him into teaching her what he knows. Eventually, the arms dealer is jailed, and JJ begins a relationship with Sophie’s mother, Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley). Four years have passed since the first movie, and the blended family has relocated to Virginia from Chicago, where JJ works as an analyst, having given up fieldwork to be a dad. Kate works as a doctor in Africa, leaving JJ and Sophie to train together. Sophie, now fourteen, is more interested in boys, especially Ryan (Billy Barratt). JJ is at a loss as to what to do when the opportunity arises to chaperone Sophie’s school choir on a trip to Italy.

The film starts out centered on JJ and Sophie at odds as she tries to spend time with Ryan and be a teen along with her friend Collin (Taeho K), who happens to be the son of David Kim. Some shenanigans ensue as JJ tries to foil Sophie’s troublemaking while also staying in the good graces of Vice Principal Nancy (Anna Faris). Eventually, JJ and Sophie become embroiled in an international terrorist plot that directly involves David Kim and Collin. Bringing Bobbi into the mix, the crew goes from Venice to Florence to Rome to try and stop a potential attack from an unnamed villain and her lead henchman, Crane (Flula Borg), who has a past with JJ. The European jaunt allows for much more action and spycraft than we got in the original My Spy, including car chases, fights, and hacking as bomb detonators count down. While it does not offer much in the way of unique action, the comedy helps elevate these sequences to another level.

Dave Bautista has repeatedly proven that he has the chops to handle comedy, action, and drama. Bautista is far more subtle in this film than in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, playing JJ as an accomplished soldier but not an unstoppable action hero. Bautista delivers some solid sequences throughout but never loses the humanity of who JJ is as a person and his reluctance to beat people up. Chloe Coleman has much more to do in this sequel and holds her own in terms of stuntwork and co-lead in an action film. At only fifteen, Coleman has a bright future ahead of her as an actor. Ken Jeong gets a lot more to do in this sequel, and despite some early jokes, he plays David Kim relatively straight. Kristen Schaal gets a little less to do, but she lands some of the best jokes in the movie. Anna Faris’ role is quite good, playing against the typical roles she has gotten in her career. The biggest surprise is Flula Borg. Borg often plays the most over-the-top comedic characters, but he is a solid villain here. His introduction shows Borg bulked up and ripped to play Crane, which helps sell him going toe-to-toe with Bautista’s JJ during the fight sequences.

Director Peter Segal (Get Smart) returns to helm My Spy: The Eternal City, and this time, he shares a screenwriting credit alongside My Spy scribes Jon and Erich Hoeber. The shift from an adult paired with a kid to a father/daughter dynamic helps the movie, as do the increased stakes of the villain’s plot. Where the first movie felt like Mr. Nanny crossed with Kindergarten Cop, the sequel is much closer to a junior version of Mission: Impossible. The jokes either work really well or fall flat with little middle ground for the rest. The shift from the chaperoned school trip to an all-out action movie is abrupt and makes the film’s first half feel unnecessary, but the chemistry between Bautista and Coleman more than makes up for it. I appreciated the larger-scale action that My Spy The Eternal City brings to the screen, but it also makes me wonder if they will do away with anything but straight spy action if a third movie were to be developed.

My Spy The Eternal City is a major step in the right direction after the underwhelming first movie. This sequel is fun to watch but is still largely forgettable due to the by-the-numbers plot that does not do much we have not seen in countless movies before. There is potential to shift this franchise into a memorable series by keeping the core characters but doing away with the pretext of them leading normal, mundane lives and embracing global action sequences with a solid amount of comedy mixed in. My Spy The Eternal City benefits from Dave Bautista’s charisma and Chloe Coleman holding her own alongside him. This is a fun distraction during the summer that would have played well on the big screen in the pre-COVID days. Slightly too mature for younger audiences, this is a solid watch for teens and families looking for a fun flick on Prime Video this weekend.