Dave Bautista gives us his best Kindergarten Cop in the family-friendly caper, My Spy.
STX
Every action star seems to go through a similar moment where they move from the violent action hits that made their names and change gears slightly to appeal to a broader, younger audience. Arnold Schwarzenegger arguably started it with Kindergarten Cop, and the likes of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson have also followed suit with mid-career movies like The Pacifier and The Tooth Fairy (yeah, we don’t talk about that).
Bautista sticks to the formula with My Spy. He plays ex-soldier turned CIA agent JJ Cena (a knowing nod to John?), and he’s struggling to adapt to the more subtle approach that the spy game calls for. In an effort to ground him, JJ’s handlers place him on a surveillance mission watching a young mother and her daughter in Chicago. When the young daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), figures him out, JJ ends up being at the mercy of her will, as she demands he shows her the way of being a spy, in return for not blowing his cover to her mum.
Coming from the director of Get Smart, a similarly silly spy caper, My Spy offers the kind of diverting family entertainment that doesn’t try to do too much to add to a formula it sees as winning. Pretty much all the general plot beats are similar to Kindergarten Cop, from a romance blossoming between JJ and Sophie’s Mum (the delightful Parisa Fitz-Henley), to a sinister ex-family member closing in towards the final act. It is a film that is more than happy to move through the motions, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its charms.
A lot of that charm comes from the cast that all clearly are having a fun time with one another. Bautista has demonstrated before how he has that nice level of self-awareness around his own body image and is quite happy to poke fun at his muscle-bound persona in his role, his dry delivery powering his strong on-screen charisma. He is also an actor quite capable of getting a lot of sympathy from even the broadest of strokes, particularly when paired with the young Coleman. As a young girl in a new home and just looking for a friend, Coleman is a great foil to Bautista’s hardened spy. Elsewhere in the cast, Kristen Schaal is a lot of fun as Bobbi, JJ’s more tech-savvy but inexperienced partner, getting many of the best lines throughout.
Where the film is less successful is in hitting its comedic beats. There are some decent gags to be found within, largely based around Bautista’s muscles and general lack of subtlety as a spy. But there’s a lot more that falls a bit flat and feels destined to age very quickly. There’s also some gags that’ll likely go over younger ones’ heads, but will not necessarily land that well with parents, hovering in a weird place between the two. The action follows a similar vein. The action scenes are perfectly well shot, but they often have a bit more of a violent edge to it than you may expect for something that otherwise seems more directed for younger audiences. As such, it is often hard to figure out just who My Spy is for from time to time.
My Spy does nothing to attempt to reinvent the wheel all that much when it comes to the story of a seemingly cold-hearted action hero getting their heart thawed by a kid that comes into their life. It borrows a lot of imagery from other action movies and it never seems to be that concerned with throwing anything that fresh or inventive into its tried and tested formula. But it makes for a more than entertaining way to kill 100 minutes, thanks to a nice sense of self-awareness from its cast and a winning pair in its combination of a giant star and pint-sized side-kick.
My Spy is released on 13th March.
