My Spy: The Eternal City
My Spy: The Eternal City
The original 2020 movie ‘My Spy: The Eternal City’ was unexpected when it comes to being both a funny and subversive modes in that it is unlike the regular action-comedy meant for families. It also had good chemistry with the main actors and Christian Schaal was an interestingly crazy main supporting character. And it came out on streaming a few months into the pandemic, so it seemed to make more sense at such an overwhelmingly inundating time.
Four years later, ‘My Spy The Eternal City’ is coming out, bringing this creative tale to an uneasy continuation. It’s hard to pinpoint the target audience for the movie: It’s too childish for adults, but quite inappropriate for small children.
The Heather Graham starring sequel directed by Pete Segal, who co-wrote the screenplay this time with the helmer and returning scribes Erich & Jon Hoeber, is quite gory along with some rather distasteful sex jokes. I am not a puritan by any means and yet there is one scene in particular where Schaal has a body part joke about an Italian statue that I was aghast at. No parent would want to explain that one.
The mood is targeted to different extremes as if “My Spy: The Eternal City” is an attempt to work in this kind of humor with outrageous slapstick, touching teen coming-of-age interludes, nice touristy views and real threats.
At one moment the narrative places us in the shoes of a teenage boy who is chased in a crosshair in a sea of sunflowers and then we beheld him appreciating a romantic Italian sunset. In one particularly cruel sequence, local boppers hit Coleman and Schaal’s characters in the face and kick them in the face, and it just feels gratuitous.
The thinking was likely that Coleman’s Sophie is 14 now, and so the audience will also have aged a few years and therefore be able to take something more full-bodied more. Whatever the logic here, it seems poorly thought out — and from a more general entertainment perspective, it simply doesn’t work.
Here, Bautista’s CIA operative JJ plays that same role even more so, living quietly in Northern Virginia, raising a school-going child and playing the father figure to Sophie, a freshman, while her mom, who is a nurse in ER, is away on work. There is a ton of clunky exposition off the top explaining what these characters are doing these days: I am just glad the CIA managed to find some time for you.
That sort of thing. JJ says that he is through with assassinations. He is into baking scones now. So when he gets the chance to accompany Sophie’s school choir for a tour to Italy, he thinks how relatively simple it will be going around the world with her.
But teenagers — they’re tough! Besides, he happens to be in the thick of another plot involving secret nuclear weapons.
Of course, Sophie gets immersed in the activity and completely looses the head over the jock she has a thing for (Billy Barratt). At the same time, her other best friend Collin (Taeho K) joins her on the school’s sponsored trip and has a crush on her. It is that very John Hughes classic where an ideal mate was right there, only that these characters have such poorly engendered qualities you would not give a hoot which of them she ends with.
Schaal’s tech-wiz Bobbi also catches a flight to Italy along with everybody else to prevent her boss from carrying out her plan of destroying the Vatican. It would figure that after this operation, JJ’s boss, Ken Jeong, would also find himself getting embroiled into the plot and so he eventually does.
Among the new faces are Anna Faris who looks quite different as a brunette and Craig Robinson who will have little to do until the very end. Although everyone expects comic gold from a cast of this nature, for some mysterious reason it never comes. There is just too much happening because “My Spy: The Eternal City” is unable to get over the fact that it cannot shift from slapstick action to over sentimental mush.
When, or rather if, “My Spy: The Eternal City” chooses to have a hiatus that is long enough, Bautista and Coleman still do entertain each other with some picturesque banter.
He is a hulking figure who has a soft spot for humor; while she is mature but not to the extent of being ostentatious. Many can understand the bewildering sullen attitude that often comes about as a teenager and one who has seen it all knows it unanswerable. However, like unwanted sequels, this too will come to an end.
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- Genre: Action, Comedy
- Country: United States
- Director: Peter Segal
- Cast: Dave Bautista, Chloe Coleman, Kristen Schaal
