My Spy: The Eternal City review – Dave Bautista’s daddy-daughter spy comedy heads to Rome

Former wrestler Dave Bautista has the chops, as they say, for comedy. He was terrific in the ensemble of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, playing a claptrap-spouting men’s rights influencer. But there’s not much going on in his performance here, headlining a charmless action comedy as a CIA tough guy in overprotective dad mode. Bautista’s delivery looks practically comatose at points, like a grizzly bear with tranquilliser dart hanging out of its neck, just about to thud to the ground, face bewildered and semi-paralysed.

The movie is a sequel to My Spy from 2020, in which Bautista’s CIA agent JJ is assigned to protect a nine-year-old girl, Sophie (Chloe Coleman). Five years on, JJ is married to Sophie’s mum and, squeezing his hulking frame into a suit, has switched to a desk job to spend more time with his new family. His colleagues think he’s gone soft, and in 14-year-old Sophie’s eyes her stepdad has gone from hero to embarrassment. She wants a bit more freedom (hyper-vigilant JJ gives her a mobile phone with a built-in taser) but is mortified when JJ is picked to chaperone her school choir trip to perform at the Vatican – where, incidentally, some baddies are searching for a Soviet suitcase nuke squirrelled away during the cold war.

There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place. For chunks, it plays as a good-natured family entertainment in the tradition of bodybuilding babysitter movies like Kindergarten Cop and Mr Nanny. Then it switches to Bond-style globetrotting action that has earned it a PG-13 rating in the US. One excruciatingly awful sequence involves a flock of killer budgerigars trained by MI6. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect too much from Bautista in the circumstances. Still, I didn’t buy him as CIA; how many agents have a unicorn tattooed on their neck?

• My Spy: The Eternal City is on Prime Video on 18 July.