BEFORE: Here we go, the first real super-snowstorm "bomb cyclone" of this winter season, and of course it falls on a Saturday, so no snow day off from work. I get to spend the day watching my moron neighbors shovel very badly - I was raised outside Boston where I saw my share of blizzards and spent many hours training with my father to learn the proper techniques, and I'm convinced that New Yorkers just have no idea how to do it right. I allow myself one hour, max, of shoveling time, during which I focus on just my front steps, the right half of the front walk, and about 10 feet of sidewalk. That's it, that's all I'm legally required to do to keep things clear, to make access for deliveries in and for us to get out for groceries, if needed. And I don't need to scrape everything down to the concrete, I can leave a thin layer and just put ice melt on top of it, especially if there will be either warm weather or a bit of sunshine tomorrow, that will finish the job.
My neighbors, both next door and across the street, however, are absolute idiots who won't rest until every little flake is off their property, and I just don't understand this. There's rain and above-freezing temperatures coming in a couple days, so why spend HOURS outside in the cold, doing more work then they have to? Right now I'm watching from my upstairs window as three or four people try to dig out each house, but they're not working together, so I see them moving the SAME snow two or three times. (Again, I'm one person and I usually do the job by myself, in one hour. I work smarter, not harder.). I see one guy moving snow from right behind his car over to the curb, but STILL in the path of the car - so he's managing to dig out AND block himself in at the same time, he's got no plan. Other people across the road move the snow from their driveways out into the street, thinking that cars driving by will run it over and melt it - but this puts all drivers at risk of skidding accidents, and I believe this is illegal, or it should be. But me going across the street and yelling at neighbors won't be productive, I've tried that and it only leads to them not listening to me, and thinking that I'm nuts. Hey, I finished in one hour, and they're willing to spend all afternoon out in the cold, working inefficiently, so who's the one who's crazy? I have learned over the years to try to let this be, let them be stupid and inefficient, because in a few days most of the snow will be gone, one way or the other, and it won't matter.
Dave Bautista carries over from "Escape Plan: The Extractors".
THE PLOT: A hardened CIA operative finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl, having been sent undercover to surveil her family.
AFTER: This film follows the Hollywood formula of pairing up a muscular or attractive top secret agent with a smaller or mousier, less attractive handler, aka "the person in the chair" who is often a tech expert who handles the mission parameters while the lead agent does the fighting and the shooting. We've seen this in "Spy" and "Central Intelligence" and many other similar comedies. Does the real CIA work like this? Honestly, I have no idea, and I'm betting that the screenwriters don't either, they just keep perpetuating the stereotypes from previous films - "Oh, this is just how it works..." as if the rules of intelligence work and buddy comedies are one and the same. Well, if the movie turns out to be funny, then I guess who cares about accuracy? And I think this particular film could have been a lot worse, there are many ways it could have run off the rails, to a greater extent than it did. Mr. Bautista has already proven he can do both action and light comedy at the same time, he did it in two "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies, and so when he's in a film like "Escape Plan 2" and just playing it straight, it feels like something is missing.
The other pairing here concerns placing him with a much younger actor, a pre-teen (is the age of 9 considered "pre-teen", or is that reserved for 11- and 12-year olds? I have no idea.). This formula goes back at least as far as Schwarzenegger, with "Kindergarten Cop", "The Last Action Hero", "Jingle All the Way" and, umm, "The Terminator"? Stallone played on this, too, with "Over the Top", "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" and "Spy Kids 3-D". So they CAN make an action film that also appeals to kids and extends over into the comedy genre, it has become something of a formula. Even Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson made "Race to Witch Mountain", "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island" and "Tooth Fairy", so Bautista is really just following in the footsteps of giants. Literal giants, I mean Arnold and The Rock are really big dudes. Good for Bautista, I say - he's in five films that are bringing my January to a close, and really showing a lot of range - action, comedy, even sci-fi (oh, it's coming...)
In "My Spy" he plays JJ, a CIA agent who had a great record in Afghanistan or Iraq, he had no problem with weapons, explosives, all the impersonal stuff. But he hasn't really made the transition to undercover work, the bad guys spot his fake Russian accent from a mile away, and so his cover's blown on a mission, he falls back on the weapons and explosives, and all the bad guys die, only that wasn't the objective of the mission, he was only supposed to be gathering information, working his way up the chain, and now all the leads are dead. As punishment he's assigned to a simple surveillance mission (grammatically, I'm opposed to using "surveil" as a verb, I've seen it a lot lately, not sure why, but I'll go out of my way to not use this. But I guess it's a word?)
JJ is paired with Bobbi, played by Kristen Schaal - again, this is the way, she's a tech and a handler, so she has to be mousy or unappealing in some way. I know this is her wheelhouse, and I can handle her voice on "Bob's Burgers", but in live-action I just can't take her, I don't know why. I hope she's compensated well for all the times a movie has gone out of its way to make her seem grating and annoying, even turning it into a joke thing doesn't really help, because she's being asked to play "annoying" time and again. Or perhaps she's just really like that, but the end result is the same, I'm frequently annoyed by her. Mission accomplished, I guess?
Anyway, it's one of those "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" situations as the smart, aware, cosmopolitan young girl realizes very quickly that there are hidden cameras in her Chicago apartment - kids these days, they're so tech savvy - and then hacks one of the cameras to trace the signal to the apartment down the hall where two CIA agents are pretending to co-habitate. The girl threatens to blow their cover unless somebody takes her ice-skating, buys her ice cream and teaches her a bunch of cool spy stuff. Which would be more embarrassing for a CIA agent in the long run, do you figure, having their cover blown or letting a little girl blackmail them? Discuss. Anyway, that's the premise.
Throw in a potential romance between JJ and the girl's widowed mother, a bunch of comedy bits when JJ is brought to "My Favorite Person" day at school - I guess it's not called "Show and Tell" or "Career Day" any more? - and then a bunch of action scenes when the girl's uncle eventually shows up in Chicago to get the flash drive with the secret plans on it, and you've got yourself a movie, I guess. More comedic events occur when Bobbi the tech person tries to do action stuff and fails, and the little girl learns a bunch of spy tactics from JJ and does really well. NITPICK POINT: If you teach a young girl how to beat a lie-detector test, though, you might actually be creating a monster.
It's SO easy to let a film devolve into slapstick, though. See the big, muscular man dance very weirdly. Watch the big, muscular man fall down while ice skating. Watch the awkward tech handle a weapon, very awkwardly. There's high comedy and low comedy, and those are two very different approaches, unfortunately the only stuff here that counts as high comedy relies very heavily on everything we know about action movies, like how the heroes in action movies tend to walk away from explosions without looking, all cool and nonchalant. So if you've seen action comedies before, you're kind of all set up for this one here, and at 100 minutes, it won't waste too much of your time.
As a bonus, the opening scenes of the film are set in Ukraine, so that couldn't be more timely.
Also starring Chloe Coleman (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Kristen Schaal (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Parisa Fitz-Henley (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Boss Level"), Devere Rogers, Greg Bryk (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Nicola Correia-Damude, Noah Danby, Vieslav Krystyan (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Basel Daoud, Ali Hassan (last seen in "Goon"), Jean-Michel Nadeau, Laura Cilevitz (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Olivia Dépatie, Keller Viaene, Darrin Baker, Michelle McLeod.
RATING: 5 out of 10 intricate tattoos (which, it turns out, are against CIA policy)
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