Is the Spy Who Dumped Me Funny
Movies | Review: 'The Spy Who Dumped Me' Is a Buddy Comedy With a Body Count
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/movies/the-spy-who-dumped-me-review.html
Review: 'The Spy Who Dumped Me' Is a Buddy Comedy With a Body Count
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Anatomy of a Scene | 'The Spy Who Dumped Me'
Susanna Fogel narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon.
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Hi. I'm Susanna Fogel. And I am the director and co-writer of 'The Spy Who Dumped Me.' "Oh my god, I killed someone! I killed someone!" O.K., Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon on the run, not equipped for the spy caper they've found themselves in. And here they go. They see a car. Now this car was rigged on a push-pull system. And they jump in. The car's in neutral. It's got these intense, heavy cables rigged up to it so we could try to make it go as slowly as possible for comic effect, which is harder than you'd think. And especially hard was having it go slowly enough that people could walk alongside it and yet with enough impact that it could knock over this magazine rack, which we found it really couldn't. So we had to attach a separate cable to that rack and have this sort of opposing push-pull pulley elaborate system, all of which went into the making of this extremely short, low-octane scene.
- The Spy Who Dumped Me
- Directed by Susanna Fogel
- Action, Adventure, Comedy
- R
- 1h 57m
In its opening minutes, "The Spy Who Dumped Me" hops from a shootout in Vilnius, Lithuania, to a birthday celebration in Los Angeles. Audrey (Mila Kunis) is turning 30 in the wake of an abrupt breakup — via text — with one of the gunmen, a skinny dude named Drew (Justin Theroux) whose profession was a secret to Audrey. The title of this pleasantly silly, sometimes jarringly violent comedy, directed by Susanna Fogel (who wrote the script with David Iserson), isn't terribly ambiguous, and I have now explained it fully.
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But Drew, who shows up back in California to trade a few more bullets and explain himself to Audrey, is as close to beside the point as a heavily armed, lethally trained international operative can be. Espionage is not what this movie is about, and romance isn't either. Yes, there are chases through various European capitals and another cute secret agent for Audrey to flirt with once Drew is sidelined, but the engine that drives the plot and sparks the jokes is her friendship with Morgan (Kate McKinnon).
"The Spy Who Dumped Me" departs from buddy-movie conventions in an important way. Audrey and Morgan aren't the usual oil-and-water pair of natural antagonists thrown together by circumstance so they can squabble their way to mutual appreciation. Instead, their bond is a constant, an absolute, the one thing in a world of lies and murderous double-crosses that is not subject to doubt. "Don't trust anyone," Drew warns Audrey, which is reasonable enough advice. But it's also implicit that the exception to the rule is Morgan, even though — or just because — Morgan is a complete goofball.
Ms. McKinnon is too inventive to make the character a standard, zany rom-com sidekick. There is no real precedent for her highly disciplined comic anarchy, but Ms. McKinnon reminds me a little of Peter Sellers in her command of voice, face and body and her ability to turn every scene into a popcorn popper of verbal and physical surprise.
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Morgan, an aspiring actress, says whatever is on her mind and seems immune to embarrassment. She either doesn't realize how ridiculous she is or doesn't care. But unlike Sellers's similarly clueless characters, who were hermetically sealed in their own delusional realities, Morgan is eager for connection. She shares everything with her parents (Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser) and fangirls over the steely head of British intelligence (Gillian Anderson). She is thrilled to acquire a nemesis, a gymnast-turned-assassin named Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno).
At times, Ms. Kunis seems stranded in Zeppo territory while Ms. McKinnon channels the other three Marx Brothers at the same time. But the two of them find a relaxed, nimble rhythm that keeps the movie going through so-so action sequences and less-than-fresh plot twists. Sam Heughan, as a spy who didn't dump anyone, does the hunky Hemsworth-brother-type thing with reasonable aplomb, and Hasan Minhaj steals a scene or two as his status-conscious partner.
The body count is high for this kind of caper, but the mayhem is weightless. This is partly because "The Spy Who Dumped Me" breezes through the clichés of the action genre with cynical weariness, and partly because Audrey and Morgan are having too much fun to be properly terrified. They seem at first like ordinary, innocent people caught up in a deadly geopolitical game, but it turns out that they're the only ones in the movie who understand what it's really about. Patriotism is fungible. Love is capricious. Bestiness is all you can really depend on.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/movies/the-spy-who-dumped-me-review.html
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