Review: 'My Spy' can't decide if it's an action movie or a kiddie film, and fails at both

When you’re a big guy like Dave Bautista — 6-foot-6, 290 pounds, and none of it flabby — you’re either going to wind up in action movies or kiddie comedies. If you try to do both at once, you’re likely to end up with a violent, unappealing mess like “My Spy.”

Bautista plays J.J., a former Army Ranger who’s now an agent for the CIA, though he’s not exactly adept at the whole stealth thing. That’s why, after taking down a Russian smuggler in an explosion-filled opening, his boss (Ken Jeong) assigns him to a boring mission: To go to Chicago (which, as usual, means they shot in Toronto) to run surveillance on Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), the widow of a dead arms dealer whose brother, Marquez (Greg Bryk), is trying to obtain classified blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

As much as J.J. loathes the assignment, he’s even grumpier that the boss has paired him with a tech analyst, Bobbi (Kristen Schaal), an eager beaver who idolizes J.J.’s exploits. But things take a turn when Kate’s 9-year-old daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), figures out that the new neighbors down the hall are, in fact, CIA agents. It takes Sophie less than five minutes to figure this out, but that’s because she’s in the movie and not as smart as the 9-year-olds in the audience who will take half that time to predict all the film’s moves.

Screenwriting brothers Erich and Joh Hoeber (“RED,” “The Meg”) never met an action-movie cliche they didn’t love — which is fine, if the purpose is to satirize the genre, but their tone is at once too serious and too silly to make that work. Director Peter Segal, who plowed similar ground in the 2008 reboot of “Get Smart,” can’t decide whether to make a movie for action-hungry teens or humor-seeking little kids, and ends up making an undigestible catastrophe that neither group will love.

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‘My Spy’

★1/2

Available Friday, June 26, for streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and language. Running time: 99 minutes.