Movie Review: Spy

Melissa McCarthy and her Bridesmaids director Paul Feig leave us shaken from laughter, but sadly not stirred, with Spy.

Watching Jason Statham skewer his tough-man persona as Agent Rick Ford, swearing with poetic dexterity and prat-falling with abandon, is just one of Spy’s delights.

The other is watching Rose Byrne vamping it up as Rayna Boyanov, an exotic uber-vixen with a hilariously homicidal lack of tolerance towards her henchmen.

Another is seeing 50 Cent, as himself, having a grand old time. (It’s just nice to see him smile, you know?)

And then, we can rank Melissa McCarthy, starring as Susan Cooper, a dowdy CIA-analyst turned sudden secret agent, on our list of reasons to see Spy.

It’s not her fault she’s been filed beneath Fiddy. Director Paul Feig stacked the deck against her the moment he picked up a copy of Get Rich or Die Tryin' and asked, “But can he do comedy?”

(We similarly hope Jason Statham was cast after being spied in his own musical masterpiece.)

Still, even an endearing, energetic and emotionally-engaging performer like McCarthy has to play fourth favourite when she’s surrounded by so many actors defying expectations with unexpected comic nimbleness.

A deserving Oscar-nominee for Bridesmaids, in which she flipped our expectations of a supporting character upside down, McCarthy must know it’s much harder to win favour as the lead in a comedy.

She also struggles to out-gun co-star Jude Law, spoofing the slick, James Bond type as Bradley Fine, for whom our heroine finds herself trapped in the dreaded ‘friend zone’.

It’s when Fine is captured by Boyanov mid-mission that CIA director Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney) sets the seemingly mild-mannered Susan Cooper to investigate and report on their whereabouts in Europe. Cooper, a surprise badass, has only revenge on the mind.

Props to writer-director Paul Feig for not making McCarthy play up the buffoonery you might see in, say, the Kevin James version of this movie. Her Susan Cooper is unquestionably equipped to handle the physical requirements of her task, no matter how many body-shaming insults Rayna levels at her, or how frequently Bradley playfully ‘negs’ her into keeping his assistant subservient.

By comparison, Rick Ford – prone to exaggeration, or at the very least, thinking the feats Statham’s character pulled off in Crank could actually be conducted in reality – keeps strolling into dangerous situations and making them immediately worse.

It’s here you can see the feminist twist on this take-down of the 007 franchise: dudes make everything worse. Considering the most recent (!) Bond movie, Skyfall, saw a main female character gunned down without any of the men expressing a hint of regard, I’d say Spy is well within its rights to have a few cracks at the expense of dudekind.

Yet, if anything, Spy could have benefited from being even more subversive. Political commentary should never suffocate ‘a bit’, except here, I fear the message will be lost in Spy’s goofy flurry of gross-out gags.

Though Feig is an expert conductor of gleefully profane conversations, his real talents lie in emotionally-grounded character moments. They’ve been ejected to make room for more high-concept action set pieces, for which his talents don’t, umm, totally apply.

By comparison, Edgar Wright’s pitch-perfect spoofs like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz use the tropes of their respective genres to generate laughs, as well as communicate a cutting, underlying message.

A great cast and a series of very funny lines aside, Spy blows its cover – and its own not-so-secret mission - with a disappointing disguise.

3.5/5

In cinemas May 21. Rated MA15+ for strong violence, coarse language and brief nudity.