Given how many times My Spy was pushed back, it would probably not be much of a surprise if the movie just outright sucked. Movies getting delayed months or even a year are just about never a good sign. Granted, the last push back was due to a global pandemic shutting down movie theaters across the country, but still. However, it’s now free to stream to anyone with Amazon Prime, and the worst case scenario is I’d have another Stuber on my hands.
Of course, I could just not watch it, but truth be told, the trailers for this one were a bit more amusing than Stuber‘s, so it might not be so bad.
JJ (Dave Bautista) is a CIA analyst with a military background. When things get violent, he’s very good at his job. He kicks ass with the best of them and mostly leaves broken corpses in his path. Except…his job often requires him to do a bit more than that. When one of his missions goes ka-boom as it seems to always do, JJ may have retrieved some plutonium, but he also lost several leads and one guy did get away with the potential to build nukes. Given his track record and inability to read faces, JJ is removed from the European leads and sent to monitor the probable innocent widow of one lead with his biggest fan in the agency, an analyst named Bobbi (the often delightful Kristen Schaal).
However, things don’t go well when Sophie (Chloe Coleman), the dead man’s young daughter, finds the hidden cameras and tracks them back to JJ and Bobbi’s safe house apartment across the street. What follows is the girl essentially blackmailing JJ into doing some things for her, starting with escorting her to a ice skating party and then training her to be a spy. Plus, she really thinks JJ is a good match for her single mom Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley).
All that said, the good news: this is not another Stuber. For one thing, this one seems to have an actual script and isn’t just asking the two leads to ad-lib all their scenes. I don’t know that Stuber relied on ad-libbing or not, but it sure felt that way, and not in a good way. Instead, with My Spy we have a movie with a good, though not great, script. I laughed out loud a couple times and was generally amused by the rest. Bautista, like other former wrestlers-turned-actors John Cena and Dwayne Johnson, has some good comedic chops and plays the humorous tough guy well. Coleman is fun too as a little girl who seems to know just what to say and do to get what she wants. Sophie is a natural spy from the looks of things, and while the whole plot may be somewhat generic as Sophie plots to put JJ and her mom together, it still played out decently enough.
True, this isn’t the greatest comedy of all time, but it was largely fun and enjoyable. Director Peter Segal’s resume is a lot of silly or dumb comedies, the best of them probably being the cinematic version of Get Smart, but he knows how to frame a good sight gag here and there, his actors are game for what’s going on, and in a year when so much has been put off, well, this one sure was a nice bit of fun.
Grade: B-
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