It is right around the corner! Baseball is over. Just a few weeks left in the fall semester. I can almost smell that Thanksgiving turkey. And that means that the big holiday movie season is almost upon us. We’ve got Creed II, a new Fantastic Beasts, Aquaman, a Mary Poppins remake, Christian Bale dressed up as Dick Cheney… This is the time of year that I save those AMC gift cards for.
But temper that enthusiasm, folks. Neither of the two movies we will talk about this month were ever going to be Oscar fodder. Look, how boring would this be if I just talked about movies you already knew were going to be good? So instead, this month, we have two female-led, spy comedies that are similar in a lot of ways but are very different in perhaps that most important.
Spy (2015) [R]
Let’s see…which one should we talk about first? Let’s go with the oldest one.
Spy stars Melissa McCarthy as CIA analyst Susan Cooper. She acts as the eyes and ears for secret agent Bradley Fine (played by Jude Law). They have an exceptional working relationship but Cooper nurses a crush on Fine who, like most folks at her job, writes her off as an aging loser.
However, during a mission, Fine is assassinated and as the agency scrambles to find someone who can continue his espionage work, Susan steps up. No one knows the mission better than the person who was with Fine every step of the way. But can she cut it in the field?
Writer / Director Paul Feig does a masterful job of keeping the tone even and the pace moving. Spy could easily fall into full-on parody or slip into a boring, formulaic action film but it never does. Part of that is down to great script writing but you need good players to pull it off.
Here’s something I never thought I would say: Jason Statham has one of the standout performances in the film. Miranda Hart and Peter Serafinowicz are also great. But of course, this movie belongs to Melissa McCarthy, who I have to tell you I don’t always like, but she is fantastic here. I’d even go out on a limb and say that I don’t remember a truly bad performance in Spy. And that even goes for 50 Cent. Yeah, seriously, 50 Cent is pretty funny in the film.
This isn’t a perfect movie but it does so many thing so well that I feel confident saying that even if you don’t normally like McCarthy’s brand of humor, I think you’ll find something here worth watching. Now, just a note, this is rated R for a reason so don’t go in expecting a family-friendly comedy.
Spy manages to be both action-packed and funny while maintaining a warm-hearted core. It is hard to recommend comedies because humor is so subjective but give Spy a shot. You’ll be glad you did.
7.5 paws out of 10
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) [R]
Next up, we have The Spy Who Dumped Me. Which was, let’s say disappointing.
Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon play Audrey and Morgan, a pair of best friends whose world gets turned upside down when they discover that Audrey’s recent ex-boyfriend was, in fact, a spy and that she must get a trophy of his to Vienna by the next morning. The two friends head off to Austria only to arrive in a situation that is far more complicated than they imagine.
I’d continue talking about the plot here but, honestly, I don’t know that I can explain why the characters chose to do what they did or what happens. If you like Kunis or McKinnon, they aren’t bad in this. They work with the material they have. As you might expect, McKinnon dives head first into the material and comes up with a few gems.
But the script is just such a mess. It is almost as if they had a bunch of scene ideas on index cards, shuffled them like a deck of cards, took the first six off the top of the deck and said “Perfect, here’s our plot!” And the run time on this is almost two hours. Honestly, at times, getting to the end of this was hard.
I just couldn’t figure out what TSWDM was trying to be. It feels like it is trying to be a buddy comedy, a spy spoof, a violent action film, a raunch fest …. Unlike Spy above, TSWDM not only fails to straddle the line between action and comedy, it seems not to realize there is a difference. Ultimately, that is to its detriment.
It isn’t exciting. It isn’t particularly funny. And I didn’t like any of the characters. Instead, it commits the greatest sin a movie can, The Spy Who Dumped Me is boring. What really stings is that the movie is chock-full of actors and actresses I would like to see in a legitimately well-made movie. Too bad this isn’t one.
5 paws out of 10
As always, if you have a movie you think I should check out or you want to talk further about one of these reviews, drop me a line on Facebook.