Stream It Or Skip It: ‘My Spy: The Eternal City’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Godawful Second-Verse-Same-as-the-First Sequel

My Spy: The Eternal City (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) exists because 2020’s My Spy was a major streaming hit during the pandemic era, when much of the global population was bored and/or existentially upset. Coincidence? I think not. We/you/I some of us/many of us were in a psychological state rendering one vulnerable to the ancient giant-ripped-guy-meets-tiny-cute-girl action-comedy formula a la Kindergarten Cop and about 14 dozen The Rock movies, this particular one starring Dave Bautista as a CIA agent and Chloe Coleman as his foil. It yielded not a single laugh – I was there, a witness staring in horror – but many streams, so here we are four years later, ready to do the same thing over again. And into the cold, uncaring emptiness of the cosmos we sigh.

MY SPY: THE ETERNAL CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: JJ’s (Bautista) days of risking his neck are behind him. He’s a family man now. A desk jockey by choice. Although his CIA boss David (Kim Jeong) really really wants to see JJ back in the field, whupping tuckus like the elite agent he is, JJ prefers to remotely oversee missions in one of those dimly lit high-tech COMMS centers we always see in movies, where the boss stands, barking orders into a headset while lesser minions sit at terminals calling up this surveillance angle here and zooming in on that screen there. His life is safer that way. Nine-to-five. Easier to be stepdad to Sophie (Coleman), since he married her mom after the events of the last movie. 

And he’s stepdadding the heck out of the poor kid, making her train at the dojo every day, molding her to be the next secret-agent tuckus-whupper, which I wouldn’t deem to be responsible parenting, but of course, nothing about this movie even pretends to reflect reality. There she is, practicing an absurd flip kick over and over again, and not landing it – possibly so she can finally land it in the third act? I ain’t sayin’! Sophie seems to enjoy this stuff, kinda, but she’s also 14 now, and also kinda wants to do the usual teenager stuff like crushing on boys and rebelling against her loving but slightly overbearing stepdad. She crushes on Ryan (Billy Barratt) while her bestie Collin (Taeho K) secretly pines for her. They all belong to the school choir, which has just been chosen to tour Italy, where there just so happens to be a lost hidden nuclear bomb just waiting to be found by evil buttholes so they can blow up the Vatican. Weird how that happens. 

This means JJ can two-birds-with-one-stone this trip: He chaperones the choir, but also gets to do lots of violence in an attempt to thwart the bad guys. JJ points out that he’s survived five tours of duty, so one choir tour should be a breeze, right? But, the movie strains to point out, he’s never had to shoot and knife and knee-in-the-nuts evil goons while wrangling a bunch of unruly TEENZ. The plot breaks its back bringing David and CIA weirdo Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) to Italy while Agent Connelly (Craig Robinson) oversees things back at the office. Does the school vice principal have anything to do with this stuff? Probably, since she’s played by Anna Faris, and a movie wouldn’t waste a decent salary on a name actor just to have her be a boring supporting player lecturing Bautista about following the rules. There’s also a musclehead bad guy (Flula Borg) tossed in here so he can eventually get into a big fight with the musclehead good guy. Shenanigans ensue. So many shenanigans.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cop and a Half. A giant of the subgenre. A giant!

Performance Worth Watching: Nobody here is given anything remotely memorable to do. So I’m just going to refer you to a better Bautista movie, Knives Out, and a better Coleman movie, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and call it done.

Memorable Dialogue: Bobbi gives young Sophie some romantic advice in a totally PG-13 movie: “Explore that wet hole like a blind man’s cane!” 

Sex and Skin: Does a naked male statue getting its stone junk punched off count?

Our Take: My Spy: The Eternal City is one of those movies where some writers – I shan’t name them, they know who they are – got paid a not-insignificant sum of money to write the stage direction, “and then they got their pubic zones pummeled by crazed finches.” Must be a good gig, but not one without shame. That particular scene marries the film’s two disparate tones: A fun-for-the-whole-family romp about a stepfather and stepdaughter bonding, and a violent escapade that toes up to the micron’s edge of R-rated raunch and flips the bird. It’s obviously trying to be Something For Everyone, but ends up being nothing for no one. It’s a mess.

It’s also a sequelitis facsimile of the previous film, which was also a sloppy and unmemorable derivation of many movies past, which form a subgenre that anyone over the age of eight should sidestep like a puddle of bubbling toxic waste. The Eternal City wants us to look at the ASTOUNDING SIGHT of a big person standing next to a small person, and laugh. But I couldn’t help but do what the movie surely desperately doesn’t want anyone to do, and root around in the subtext, where you’ll find a story about a man dealing with his feelings of parental inadequacy by training his stepdaughter to be a very violent person who takes insane risks just like him — and then watching as she does very violent things and takes insane risks when the opportunity to do so inevitably occurs. And once you make this observation, the movie surely wants to hire a very large and scary man to grab you and haul you back to the surface and stay there, or else.

Some films wear you down to get in your good graces, this one just wears you out. It’s relentless in all the wrong ways, a-barreling forward at a hyperactive Mountain-Dewed pace: A close shave here, a car chase there, explosions, a random boxing match, teenagers drinking and playing spin the bottle and barfing and then standing and singing in front of the Pope while hungover. At 112 minutes, it’s interminable. At one point, I looked down and there were 40 minutes to go; 15 minutes later, I swear there was still 40 minutes to go. When a movie has you disbelieving the basic physical laws of reality, you know it’s a problem.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The first My Spy was lame and desperate and formulaic, but also popular, so the sequel is also lame and desperate and formulaic. It’s up to you whether it’s also popular, and I suggest doing your best not to make it so.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.