My Spy The Eternal City (2024) Review: Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman Return in This Uninspired Spy Comedy

The original gang, both onscreen and behind the cameras from 2020’s My Spy returns with a straight-to-streaming sequel, My Spy The Eternal City. Despite the spy-movie cliché in the first movie, it still benefits from an entertaining chemistry between the hulking tough-guy Dave Bautista and plucky then-newcomer Chloe Coleman. The sequel? It was unbelievably bad as if the returning team — director Pete Segal and screenwriters Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber — have their works being secretly replaced by AI but with their names intact in the credits.

My Spy The Eternal City does get off to a fairly entertaining start: an action set-piece on a private plane revolving around JJ (Dave Bautista) facing a sudden attack while in the mid-air flight. Too bad the fun opening sequence gradually fizzles with a series of uninspired moments during its protracted running time of nearly two hours long — a far cry from the first movie’s breezy 99 minutes.

The last we met JJ and Sophie, the latter was a nine-year-old girl who managed to make a fool and even outsmart a supposedly experienced former Army Ranger turned CIA operative. That’s the fun which helps elevate the first movie as they play off each other well.

The sequel, which takes a few years later, has seen Sophie already turn 14 years old teenager. Naturally, everything changes when one enters the teenagehood. That means we get to see all the usual scenarios surrounding Sophie — she becomes rebellious and prefers more personal space than spending time with her now-stepfather, JJ to her widowed mum (Parisa Fitz-Henley, who is sadly reduced to a smaller role this time around) like she used to in her childhood. She also used to idolise him and this is especially true ever since JJ quit his field duty in favour of a safer, deskbound job being an analyst. Even his tech support partner, Bobbi (Kristen Schaal, equally wasted in a thankless role, unlike in the first movie) feels the same.

However, JJ has his chance to reconcile his rocky relationship with Sophie when he becomes a chaperone for her high-school choir field trip in Italy. In the meantime, Sophie has a crush on her dream boyfriend Ryan (Billy Barratt) but her best friend, Collin (Taeho K) doesn’t seem happy about it.

The sequel doesn’t forget its spy-movie tropes and here, it’s all about a missing agent who fails to hand over a hard drive containing vital information about the hidden nuclear bombs. There’s something fishy going on and among the perpetrators behind the conspiracy involves a man named Crane (Flula Borg). This character turns out to be someone who ruined JJ’s life in the past, which instantly reminds me of the late Derrick O’Connor’s Pieter Vorstedt responsible for causing Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs’ life turned upside down in Lethal Weapon 2.

Too bad Pete Segal could only muster a superficial revenge angle between JJ and Crane. Most of the scenes that take place in Italy keep stumbling as it goes. The comedy is largely unfunny and the attempted love triangle between Sophie, Ryan and Collin is only glossed over. I was expecting a coming-of-age story, given Sophie’s appropriate age but that doesn’t happen. The whole spy-movie plot feels like an afterthought as Segal’s attempt to spice it up with a mysterious villain barely matters anyway.

Worst of all, it’s the weirdly lack of chemistry between Bautista and Coleman. As for the individual performances, the former looks like he’s comatose for most of the movie. Just because his character has turned into a boring analyst, does he have to act boring too? By the time his inner beast finally awakens him during the third act, it’s all too late and too little. The ensuing fistfights, shootouts and a car chase are disappointingly limp and none of them holds a candle to the first movie’s climactic scene in a single-strip airfield.

My Spy The Eternal City is currently streaming on Prime Video.