The James Bond jetpack sequence in “Thunderball” (1965) was a cheesy-awesome thing that was like, “Whoa! The future will be jetpacks!” “My Spy the Eternal City” opens like a Bond film, or maybe a movie whose goal is to make the “Kingsman” series look weighty. Dave Bautista’s JJ, a former Special Forces soldier turned CIA operative, is on a private plane, where he’s playing bodyguard to a teen idol named Ryan (Bill Barratt). Out of the blue, he’s attacked by the flight attendant. As they go at each other with sharp objects, a helmeted figure zips through the sky in a jetpack, placing a bomb on one of the plane’s windows and blowing a hole in its side; everyone comes tumbling out, and a plunging-to-the-earth scuffle ensues.
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The hook? The jetpack flier is Sophie (Chloe Coleman), a teenage spy with hair like a tent of frizz. While falling through the air and rescuing JJ, she shouts, “So for the last time, can I go to the homecoming dance with Ryan this Saturday?” JJ: “Saturday? You’ve got underwater training scheduled!” Peeved, she lets JJ drop, clinging to Ryan instead. When he tells her that he can’t go to the dance with her because he’s taking Olivia Rodrigo instead, she drops him as well. So this is what happened to the James Bond future. Like power-strutting rock ‘n’ roll and death by fashion, it became bratty kicks for kids.
Except that calling “My Spy the Eternal City” a movie of kicks would be stretching things. After the preposterous extravagance of that opening sequence, the film settles into a generic groove that makes it seem at times like a “Spy Kids” movie minus the gizmos (and, therefore, most of the fun). This one comes closer to “Cloak and Dagger,” the 1984 thriller, starring Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman, that was also a wide-eyed chain of espionage clichés gussied up with a “Look! It’s a kids’ movie!” comedy gleam.
Chloe Coleman, the star of the “My Spy” films, is a vivacious actress, cool on the surface but never passive, and in this sequel to “My Spy” (2020), she plays Sophie as a precocious 14-year-old who now looks askance at JJ, the agent who trained her in the ways of spycraft but is still figuring out how to be her surrogate dad. (After the events of the first film, he became romantic partners with her mom.) Bautista, once again, is the film’s central presence, doing the cuddly-brute thing that Arnold used to do; pairing him with a kid is supposed to be a way to keep him lovable. Like other wrestler-turned-actors, Bautista might seem to be defined by his look — the bulk, the glower, the circus-strongman noggin — but it’s really his voice that commands. It’s loutish but fast, as if he were blurting out each thought to pummel you.
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The film is set mostly in Italy, where JJ is helping to chaperone Sophie’s high-school choir field trip. As she’s poised in a YA triangle between selfish dreamboat Ryan and earnest nerd Collin (Taeho K), JJ just happens (or not) to have a run-in with a gang of baddies presided over by Nancy, an oligarch’s moll played by Anna Faris in wet-look platinum hair and magenta lipstick and raccoon eyeshadow. So incensed is she at certain oligarchs having had their fortunes stripped away that there is now a WMD planted under the Vatican. That sounds serious, but “My Spy the Eternal City” is a movie in which Ken Jeong, with his meta flakiness, plays the head of covert operations for the CIA, and in which he and JJ are attacked by a swarm of killer finches.
The film is light enough without being funny enough, most of it staged, by director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy,” “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”), in a kind of generic action overdrive. There’s one unintentionally hilarious line that really captures the current state of things. We hear the villain’s electromagnetically disguised voice making threats and demands to CIA headquarters: The WMD will go off unless $15 million per G7 country is paid. (If it’s not paid, the voice says, there will be no more G7.) Then we see Craig Robinson, as a CIA operative, respond by saying, “We’ve got to move POTUS, now!” But the way the film has been set up, you think: What does POTUS have to do with anything?
There’s also a moment that made me laugh out loud. JJ confronts a villainous henchman, played by Flula Borg as a cross between Colin Firth and Dolph Lundgren. He confesses that he went to JJ’s home and spared his dog, but that the prized blue fish in the bowl beside his bed now “sleeps with the fishes.” JJ looks up, eyes like burning coals, and says, “Forgive me for what I’m about to do,” and as he begins to smash and kick like a human Terminator, Kristen Schaal, as his right-hand operative, does the best delivery of “Release the Kraken!” I’ve ever heard. For most of the movie, though, Bautista plays JJ as a well-behaved paternal Kraken. Going forward, he needs to find out how to evolve his charisma without letting it get too domesticated.
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