99 min | PG-13 | June 26, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A hulking CIA operative blows an operation and gets stuck on surveillance duty in a Chicago apartment. The nine-year-old he is supposed to watch catches him on camera and blackmails him into spy lessons. You have seen this movie. You have seen it better.
J.J. is a CIA operative built like a refrigerator and trained to kill. He botches a field mission and gets punished with surveillance duty. The agency parks him outside a Chicago apartment to watch a widow and her nine-year-old daughter who may have ties to an arms dealer. The daughter finds his hidden cameras and blackmails him into teaching her how to be a spy. My Spy is the tough-guy-meets-cute-kid formula run exactly to spec, and the film knows it.
Dave Bautista plays J.J. as a slab of muscle with no idea how to talk to a child, and his deadpan is the only thing in the film with a pulse. He underplays everything and lets his size carry the joke. Chloe Coleman plays Sophie with a confidence that runs circles around every adult in the room, and she sells the blackmail even when the dialogue does not. Kristen Schaal plays Bobbi, the surveillance partner, as a fangirl who treats stakeouts like a convention, and her chatter grates against Bautista’s stillness in the right way. Parisa Fitz-Henley plays Kate, the mother, with a warmth the script never develops into a person. Greg Bryk plays the arms dealer Marquez as a placeholder villain who exists to trigger a third act.
Peter Segal directs with the flat competence of a man who has made this kind of studio comedy many times. The action scenes are shot clean and cut for clarity, which is more than most of the genre manages, but they carry no tension because the outcome is never in doubt. Erich and Jon Hoeber write the script as a string of beats you can predict from the poster. The film leans on needle drops and montage to manufacture the bond between J.J. and Sophie, scoring their training sessions to pop songs instead of earning the connection in scenes. Production design hands J.J. a sterile bachelor apartment that the film treats as a punchline, and the gag lands once before it repeats.
My Spy works exactly as well as it intends to and no better. It is engineered to be inoffensive, and it succeeds at being nothing else. Bautista is a real comic presence trapped in material that asks him to soften on cue, and the film never trusts him to do anything surprising. Every beat arrives on schedule. The result is a movie you forget while you are still watching it.