I spy with my little eye... not many laughs

My Spy (12) Verdict: Daft but amiable ★★★✩✩

THERE was some ostentatious guffawing during the press screening of My Spy — but none of it came from me. Maybe it was a plant.

In fairness, there are a few amusing lines, and a running gag referencing other movies builds to a conclusion worthy of a smile, but otherwise this feels curiously like an Eighties throwback — the kind of daft comedy that might once have paired Arnold Schwarzenegger with Macaulay Culkin.

The engagingly wooden Dave Bautista plays JJ, a hugely strong but haplessly accidentprone CIA agent. After a regrettable muck-up on field duty in the Ukraine, he is assigned a safer job in Chicago, surveilling Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), who unwittingly married into a family of international master-criminals, and her nine-year-old daughter Sophie (Chloe Coleman, above with Bautista).

When the precocious Sophie rumbles him and his kooky partner (Kristen Schaal), JJ befriends her and inevitably begins to fall for her fragrant mother. There’s an awful lot of verbal and physical galumphing before JJ proves in the nick of time that when the going gets tough . . . well, let’s just say there are no surprises in this amiable enough film, which isn’t nearly as rib-ticklingly hilarious as at least one person thinks it is.