My wife and I visited the Morris theatre to see The Spy Who Dumped Me. I have mixed feelings about this one — it’s got actors I generally like, it whizzed along at a good clip, and there were a few laughs in it, but the story. Jeez, the story.
I can sort of imagine how this thing was pitched, as a mish-mash of common tropes. It’s a fish out of water story, and it’s a spy story, and it’s a buddy movie, and the two buddies are women. There’s a mcguffin! Also, it’s got John Wickian moments of ultra-violence! Plus, clever moments of subtle comedy, where female spies have the advantage of a special place where they can hide the mcguffin. It’ll be great!
On the positive side, Mila Kunis is good, and Kate McKinnon is…antic. I like McKinnon, but the eye-bulging mugging is more appropriate for impersonating Giuliani, and got to be a bit much (a phrase used within the movie to describe her character). She’s not really acting here, but is going over the top ala Jim Carrey. I’m looking forward to the day she calms down and tries to build a character on a serious foundation.
This is supposed to be a comedy, but it is also set in what looks like a very dark universe, populated with mostly evil characters. Kunis meets the spy (the one who will dump her) in a bar, and later it turns out that the bar is full of other spies watching her. They later have to try to exchange the mcguffin in a Vienna cafe, and everyone there, patrons, waitstaff, bartender, everyone, is armed to the teeth and trying to get their hands on the mcguffin, and it erupts into a fierce gun battle in which everyone is shooting at everyone else, there’s no sense of who is on what side, and you don’t really care who wins. But it’s an excuse to double-tap people in the head, knife them, break necks, and leave a bloody tableau of corpses sprawled all over the floor and furniture. It’s a bit much, and doesn’t mesh well with any sense of comedy.
While it moves along from moment to moment, with fragments of entertainment no matter how discordant with each other, the overall plot is a mess. The ending feels like something that was cobbled together without regard for prior events, just to bring it to a conclusion, and there’s no sense of continuity in the story. Mild plot spoilers below — but trust me, they don’t really matter, because it’s not as if knowing them affects the flow of the story, or that there is a story that needs to be resolved.
OK, maybe this is a major plot spoiler, if you’re assuming the plot makes any sense at all. Last chance to back out.
~
~
~
~
~
~
The titular spy is murdered in plain sight after he passes on the mcguffin to Mila Kunis — he’s shot at point blank range by a naked one-night stand Kate McKinnon had brought in (See? Everyone is a bad guy), and the two heroes even frantically check for a pulse before announcing he’s dead and fleeing in a panic with the mcguffin. This is the whole premise of the movie: they have to complete his mission, or thousands of lives might be lost.
But at the end, the spy suddenly reappears, not a scratch on him, and no explanation for how he survived, and it turns out he was a villain himself — he has returned to demand the return of his mcguffin. Why he went through this elaborate charade and expected two utterly unqualified people to stumble through a series of life-threatening events, including torture, to deliver something to Europe that he had already in his possession is also unexplained. Why he had a year-long relationship with this woman before dumping her and launching her on a complex, dangerous mission…unexplained.
It’s almost as if the writers knew they were writing a spy story, and spy stories need surprising double-crosses, so they fill the plot with random reversals with no need for motivation or logic. It’s just everybody against everybody, and that’s sufficient justification.
So it ends with a confusing bit of chaos that makes no sense. It’s like the writers had laid out all these intricate threads of plot, and at the end, they just resolved everything by tying them in one big tangled knot and setting it on fire.
And then our fish out of water decide they love spy games, become professional secret agents, and close the movie by murdering some people in some random caper. Really.
Definitely do not watch this movie if coherent plotting is something you expect. Sure, enjoy it if you like seeing Kunis and McKinnon working together.
BlackKKlansman is also playing at the theater. I think I’ll have to check that one out, if nothing else to cleanse out my impression of The Spy Who Dumped Me.
A example of why I don’t watch American movies.
Was this a sequel to Spy, my naive impression from TV commercials (30 sec. trailers).
which was also a fish outta water with a fauxCIA secretary filling in for a spy she idolized.
That cafe scene sounds like a scene in Kingsman or the Kingsmen or whatever the hell it was called where things just explode into pornographic ultraviolence in a church and the ‘good guy’ ends up murdering hordes of innocent people. That’s the point where I turned off the movie…
slithey tove@2–
I didn’t hate Spy. Neither great nor terrible. At least it had some self-aware humour especially from Jason Statham poking fun at his usual onscreen persona. If this had been a sequel I might have watched it on an evening I needed some light mindless diversion. But it sounds more like a terrible script that only got greenlit because of superficial similarities after Spy made $236 million.
Derek Vandivere@2–
I have very mixed feelings about the first Kingsman movie, but in its defence the hero turning ultraviolent in the church was because of a mind control system employed by the villains, did not represent his character, and he was horrified by his actions once it was over. Sadly, there are many other aspects of the movie that are not defensible so I’m certainly not recommending you go back to watch the rest of it…
That’s SOP with current “cuttin’ edge” drama, innit? Incoherence will be our epitaph…
Uh, that’s not exactly what happened.
Kate McKinnon is very good at what she does, which is to go all the way over the top. You might wonder, is she really acting, or is she just insane? I would compare her to Bill Murray rather than Carrey, but if you want to go there: Carrey got famous by doing amazing physical comedy. Do you remember when he tried to get serious and win an Oscar? (spoiler: he never won one, although he did pick up a couple of Golden Globes.) He was actually in some good movies. The Truman Show was very good. So was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Good movies, but the best thing about them was not Carrey’s dramatic acting. On the other hand, do you remember Man on the Moon? I’d like to forget that one too.
So I suggest letting Kate McKinnon do what she does, and hope for a better vehicle for her talents.
I thought the most cringeworthy thing about Kingsmen was that a group of old, rich, white guys decided to found a secret organization accountable to no one and this was portrayed as a positive thing.
I don’t mind the two lead actresses, but that wouldn’t be enough to get me to go – then again, I have a few more choices than PZ. I saw BlacKkKlansman last week, which was overall excellent though it had many of the same problems that a lot of Spike Lee films – a bit overlong (like he wants to put in every idea he has) and his insistence on wall-to-wall music continues to annoy me. And I don’t think the bluntness of comparisons with orange Hitler was necessary, really. Anybody going to see this movie gets it. But those are small issues to me, it’s both powerful and quite funny overall and Washington and Driver make a great alternative buddy cop pairing.
Also saw 2001 on IMAX yesterday, as great as ever. Not my absolute favorite SF film but probably the most visually spectacular, still.
chrislawson @4
And this shows how subjective comedy is. Spy is one of my favourite comedies in recent years.
Slithey tove @2
The movie isn’t so much a fish out of water as it is about a woman, particularly a woman with an average body type, who was never given the chance to show what she’s capable of.
Melissa McCarthy’s comedy style might not be to everyone’s tastes, but I can’t tell you how much I love that she’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world right now.
@microraptor #8:
That would be the secret organisation whose rich, old, white leader allied himself to the bad guy and was willing to bring on the death of half of humanity. He was killed by the young not-rich-though-still-white agent and his friends. OK. Everyone’s entitled to their interpretation.
The director, Susan Fogel, said she was really looking to make a movie about female friendships that didn’t have to do with a wedding. Making it an action comedy was how to get released as a mid-budget film.
I thought it was funny, but I didn’t appreciate the over-the-top violence.
Rich Woods @11
And that young not-rich-though-still-white man went on to have a lifestyle of wearing expensive suits, driving expensive cars, and drinking expensive liquor while dating a Swedish princess.
Then maybe she should have made Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) with Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow. I rather enjoyed it, possibly because Kudrow is one of my favorites.
I enjoyed it a lot, because 1) I love a spy comedy, 2) I love Kate McKinnon, and 3) it was so good to see a movie about two women in which the conflict between them wasn’t the central point, because there was no conflict between them — they weren’t competing for a man or a job or anything else, they were just friends who stumbled into a (completely unbelievable, ridiculous, only-in-the-movies) situation and had to get out of it somehow. Honestly, if you’re going to see a summer popcorn movie you could do so much worse.
@Reginald
Because we only need one female friendship movie, made over 20 years ago? What the hell was the point of this comment?
I quite like Kate McKinnon, but I couldn’t even make it to the end of the trailer for this film.
@9, muzzlehatch65
You thought BlacKkKlansman was overlong but you managed to sit through 2001? While I think it was visually stunning, I’ll probably never watch it again, because you could cut out about 35% of the film and not lose a thing.