Producers: Chris Bender, Pete Segal, Jake Weiner, Robert Simonds, Gigi Pritzker, Dave Bautista and Jonathan Meisner Director: Pete Segal Screenplay: Erich Hoeber, Jon Hoeber and Pete Segal Cast: Dave Bautista, Chloe Coleman, Ken Jeong, Kristen Schaal, Anna Faris, Taeho K, Billy Barratt, Craig Robinson, Flula Borg, Nicola Correia-Damude, Noah Danby, Devere Rogers and Pariza Fitz-Henly Distributor: Prime Video
Grade: C-
The makers of this sequel to Pete Segal’s innocuous 2020 “My Spy” must believe that viewers want nothing more than to see Dave Bautista get beaten up. That might have been true when the beefy guy was still holding down his previous job as a pro wrestler, but one wonders whether the audience for which these movies are produced have the same desire to see the poor guy repeatedly clobbered, as happens here. Of course, the fact that ultimately he comes out on top and achieves his dream of having his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter finally call him dad is supposed to justify all the blows he’s suffered.
Still, Bautista must be satisfied, since “The Eternal City” represents not just a sequel but a reunion of sorts: all the major members of cast and crew return. There are additions to the acting roster, of course—for example, Craig Robertson, brought in to provide added laughs as a bumbling CIA agent (unfortunately, they never arrive)—but in addition to Bautista, Chloe Coleman, Kristen Schaal, Ken Jeong, Noah Danby, Devere Rogers and Pariza Fitz-Henly are all back. And along with Segal and co-writers Jon and Erich Hoeber, so are production designer Chris L. Spellman, cinematographer Larry Blanford, editor Jason Gourson and composer Sean Segal.
It’s a pity that given a second shot, they haven’t come up with something better than this tired piece of hokum.
The movie spans a bigger canvas than the first, which was confined pretty much to what passed for Chicago, where disgraced CIA agents JJ (Bautista) and Bobbi (Schaal) were assigned by their angry boss David Kim (Jeong, badly miscast) to watch over Kate (Fitz-Henly), the endangered sister-in-law of an arms dealer, and her precocious ten-year-old daughter Sophie (Coleman). By the close JJ and Kate had become a couple.
Four years later Sophie is fourteen, and JJ has become a homebody, insisting on a desk job at Langley while he looks after his wife and high school daughter. Not that one would anticipate such a peaceful situation from the movie’s opening, in which JJ is bodyguard to teen heartthrob Ryan (Billy Barratt) and they’re rescued from a jet by high-flying Sophie after being attacked by a nefarious flight attendant (Anna Faris). But it all turns out to be a dream centered on Sophie’s infatuation with Ryan, the lead singer in her school choir, and her frustration with JJ’s overprotective attitude.
The choir has been invited to sing at a concert in the Vatican where the pope will host all the leaders of the G7 nations, and JJ agrees to serve as one of the chaperones alongside the school’s obnoxiously overbearing principal Nancy (Faris again). Ryan will be going, of course, along with their classmate Collin (Taeho K), a sweetly nerdy kid who’s the son of Kim but unaware of his father’s secret agent ties, believing him a nurse. Collin is clearly smitten with Sophie, although she just considers him a buddy; the kid’s also smothered by his dad, a widower to whom he’s all-important.
JJ is torn between keeping absolute control over his charges, as Nancy demands, and being a good guy with a little permissiveness. The latter tendency leads to a mistake: he allows Sophie to go out unattended with Ryan and Collin one night, and during their visit to a gelato shop, Collin is kidnapped. That brings a frantic Kim to Italy, along with Bobbi, to work with JJ and Sophie, whom he’s trained in self-protection and implausibly thinks would be safer with him, to track down the culprits, free the boy, and short-circuit their nefarious plot.
The ultimate villain of the piece won’t be revealed here, but the chief enforcer of the mastermind is Crane (Flula Borg), an ex-colleague of JJ’s in the field who turned on his comrades and now works for the dark side. As to the plot in which he’s involved, it’s a silly, complicated extortion scheme involving suitcases of Soviet-era nuclear bombs, the device that can prime them to explode and deactivate them, and explosives beneath the Vatican. JJ, Kim, Bobbi and Sophie have to jump through hoop after hoop—and JJ go through beating after beating—before the plot is foiled, you guessed it, just in the nick of time, after a chase through the streets of Rome. (A digression: why has the Italian capital become the go-to site for such carnage-causing street rampages in Hollywood action movies? Does the government offer special tax breaks?)
In any event, all ends well, as you’d expect. JJ and Sophie get closer as a result of their adventure, and she finally calls him Dad. The girl sees jock Ryan’s cowardly side and dumps him for Collin, who finally recognizes his dad for the heroic type he is. Kim and Bobbi find happiness after years of her unrequited pining. And, of course, the Vatican is saved.
There are a few amusing moments here, like one where Crane taunts JJ about what he’d done to his beloved bluefish, which acts as an incentive for him to take charge. And the Italian locations are nice to look at. On the other hand, though Schaal’s deadpan delivery is generally one of the movie’s major strengths, a couple of her throwaway lines might offend more sensitive Catholics. And must a villain (in this case Crane) again be a devotee of classical music, though in this case it’s operatic Italian arias? (In fairness, there are plenty of more pop-oriented needle-drops as well.)
The net result is an awfully standard-issue example of this kind of strongman-plus-kid action-comedy fare, a genre in which such hulks as Schwarzenegger, Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel and John Cena have also appeared. In that company Bautista doesn’t do badly; he’s certainly up to the physical demands, his comic timing is pretty sharp, and he can pull off the downcast sentimental stuff too. Coleman is an agreeable companion for him, and the other youngsters are more than adequate. But Jeong overdoes the manic bits, Borg is generically nasty, and Faris is pretty much wasted. At least Schaal brings an occasional smile to the proceedings.
One might ask whether this streaming franchise will add other European capitals to its hit list in future installments. But one hopes not.