My Spy: The Eternal City Parent Guide

JJ (Dave Bautista) has settled into his new role as a family man with a desk job, a far cry from his time as a CIA operative, though he still regularly trains his stepdaughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), in all the skills a future spy might need. When Sophie’s high school choir travels to Italy, JJ signs up to be a chaperone so he can spend more time with her. But once his boss’s son is kidnapped, JJ realizes that there is more to this trip than meets the eye – and only he and Sophie will be able to save the young man.

I have not seen the preceding film, 2020’s My Spy, and I am eternally grateful for that. I also wish I hadn’t seen this one, but fate’s cruel hand had other plans for my Thursday evening. Sometimes I fear that this job has ruined my internal scale for movie quality: I see so many bad ones that I can justify middling ones because I’ve seen so much worse. However, this film put those worries to rest as I was very easily able to tell that it’s awful. I checked the remaining runtime approximately 30 times over the course of this torture and I’m pretty sure I blacked out briefly. I was both bored and annoyed throughout and visibly started squirming on my couch during the third act because of how much I wanted to do something, anything else with my time.

I like Dave Bautista. I think he can be very funny and charismatic and a surprisingly emotional actor. I am a big Kristen Schaal fan. I love Ken Jeong. I’m not very familiar with Chloe Coleman but she seems lovely. None of these people deserved the insult that is this movie. They are good people who did nothing wrong, yet this production feels like some sort of collective punishment. Perhaps the writers each had John Wick-level reasons for vengeance against the cast. Perhaps Jeff Bezos himself had a score to settle. There is no way to know, but there is a way to excuse yourself from this reputational bloodbath: you have a chance to turn away, to be free. It’s too late for me.

I can’t even begin to describe all of the reasons why I detest this film, so I’ll be brief. The writing is some of the worst I’ve ever heard, many of the special effects are laughably bad, there are few, if any, jokes, the plot makes no sense, and there aren’t any fun spy gadgets or antics to make up for all of that. It just feels like a waste of time. If you’re going to be bad, at least be entertaining. The level of negative content makes this unsuitable for young audiences, but the sheer horribleness makes it unsuitable for anyone of any age anyway. The Eternal City feels like an apt title, since watching this film felt like an eternity in purgatory.