What’s It About
Nine-year-old Sophie catches JJ, a hardened CIA operative, spying on her family during a routine surveillance operation. In exchange for not blowing his cover, JJ begrudgingly agrees to show the precocious girl how to become a spy. What at first seems like an easy task soon turns into a battle of wits as Sophie proves you don’t need much experience to outsmart a seasoned agent.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Dave Bautista is/was a wrestler, and like most people from the WWE, their movies suck – mostly. In My Spy, Dave plays a CIA agent named JJ. He’s a serious, no B.S. type of person, lacking all kinds of standard social skills. The first six minutes of this film shows you everything you need to know about JJ to come to that conclusion. That same six minutes also plays out like it could be a very promising spy movie. Unfortunately, that’s the only time this film has that sort of feel to it. The rest of My Spy is the standard made-for-kids family flick. While JJ is on a “last chance” mission performing surveillance on a mother/daughter family (There’s always a last-chance mission because the main spy/cop/detective is on thin ice with their superior), he and his co-worker get busted by the daughter of the family they were spying on. As seen in the trailer, Sophie (the daughter) catches JJ talking to his co-worker about the whole operation. Sophie agrees to keep it a secret if JJ trains her to be a spy. The trailer tells you everything you need to know about this movie, plus it has the best parts of the film. Watching Bautista play the straight guy while getting humiliated by a nine-year-old is funny at first, but having to watch him get repeatedly bested gets old real fast. Typically, I would state that this movie is amusing for its target audience, kids 14 and under, but not this time. My Spy is a slow-moving, cringeworthy, halfway decent attempt at family entertainment. Bautista is not a leading actor by any stretch of the imagination, and he’s definitely miscast in comedic roles. To be fair, the script was more direct-to-video in quality, and it would have needed a damn good actor to pull off most of the “funny” parts successfully. Overall, My Spy is a poor excuse by the production company to try and capitalize on Dave Bautista’s Guardians of the Galaxy popularity.
OUR RATING – A DEFINITE “HE DID IT FOR THE CHECK” 4