It's nice when I can go to the movie theater and the exact movie that I'm in the mood for is the movie being released that week.
Pretty much the day that spy movies became a thing, spy movie spoofs have been around. The first Casino Royale movie in 1967 was a comedy, after all. There are several varieties. Some are about a loved one having a secret life (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Killers). Others feature a regular person unwittingly tagging along with a spy (Knight & Day, Central Intelligence). The most recent trend has been making a spy comedy while still being a spy movie - having your cake and eating it too (Spy, Kingsman: The Secret Service). There really aren't any new angles to try. The best anyone can do is try to execute it all a little differently, which is what The Spy Who Dumped Me does.
The story, as I mentioned, is pretty familiar: Audrey (Mila Kunis) is a slacker who is getting over her boyfriend dumping her via text. Her lifelong best friend, Morgan (Kate McKinnon) wants to cheer her up. After being ghosted for a week, Audrey's boyfriend (Justin Theroux) contacts her, telling her not to burn the things he left in her apartment. The next day, Audrey gets contacted by CIA agents who tell her that her ex-boyfriend is a spy. Soon after that, some assassins go after Audrey and Morgan, which sets off an international chase as they try to get some important McGuffin into the right hands. It's a bit of a mix of all the types of spy comedy.
What differentiates The Spy Who Dumped Me is that it's a buddy movie with two regular people. I'm sure other movies have done this, but I can't think of another movie like that, that's just two friends with agency in the spy world. Normally it's one person alone or someone paired with an agent. And the duo is this movie's greatest strength. Director Susanna Fogel's only other feature film was the small indie movie Life Partners from 2014. I liked that movie more than I expected. It too was about two lifelong friends and its best moment were seeing the two leads just interacting as friends. The same is true about The Spy Who Dumped Me. Kunis and McKinnon are at their best when they are performing for each other. They actually make each other laugh in the movie. That's surprisingly rare. There's this unwritten rule in a lot of comedies that the characters can't know how funny they are. That is ignored in this movie and it's my favorite thing about it. I'm watching a movie about these two friends hanging out. It just happens to be in the middle of spy movie.
Tied to that, something else that's interesting is that the movie isn't concerned with commenting on the spy movie genre. Most spy comedies are very meta. They play on your expectations of the spy movie genre. The jokes come from how things contrast with a normal spy movie. There's some of that in this movie. Much more of it is buddy comedy stuff. Kunis and McKinnon crack jokes like any friends would to cut the tension of a difficult situation. They aren't trying to deflate the movie. They are just responding to the world around them.
Kunis and McKinnon make a deceptively strong duo. Kunis is the straight man (or straight woman - I never know if that needs to be adapted for genders) and McKinnon goes for the jokes. It's a great balance. McKinnon never moves into the Melissa McCarthy (at her worst) territory of taking over the movie. She's hilarious and knows how to deploy it. Kunis doesn't try to insert herself into the jokes too much. She also doesn't do that thing where the straight man tries to counter the other person in equal measure by being overly buttoned up or fussy. I believe these two are best friends. Audrey enjoys having Morgan around to entertain her, and Morgan appreciates that Audrey "gets" her. The friendship comes from a Sundance dramedy place even if it's surrounded by a silly action movie.
And let me be clear: this is a very silly movie. It's a delightfully silly movie. It's the kind of movie where a former Olympic gymnast turned supermodel turns out to be an assassin and leaves in the middle of a show in a chrome sports car when she gets an assignment (Note: Ivanna Sakhno is bizarrely good in this). I giggled as much as I laughed. Fogel also co-wrote the movie in addition to directing it. As far as I can tell, she didn't cut her teeth writing for sitcoms or working in other comedy films and it shows (co-writer David Iserson does have that background though). The humor is a little off. This doesn't feel like it came from the same school of comedy that so many other films do. While I enjoy movies like Tag or Game Night, they do have a "house style" that makes them hard to stand out. I can see the subtle differences* in The Spy Who Dumped Me turning people off. I haven't checked, but I assume I liked this movie much more than aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.
*Before you think I'm suggesting that I'm smarter than people and saw things that other people won't, I want to make it clear: I'm not sure what these "subtle differences" are. I'm still trying to figure them out. I could just tell that something was off (not in a bad way).
The movie is by no means perfect. At almost 2 hours, it really drags. Something closer to 90 minutes would've probably played better. The editing isn't great either. I'm not a stickler about visual continuity and all that. So, if I'm noticing issues, that means they must be really bad. Throughout the movie, shots don't match up. Two people will be talking to one another, and when the camera switches from one person to the other, it's clearly from a different take. Mila Kunis will be laughing, then it cuts to a different shot or angle and she'll be stone-faced. I assume it was a decision to use the best take over continuity, but it got distracting.
Whoever the team was working on the stunts and choreography, they deserves some praise. The action scenes are over the top without showing off. Bits of choreography were more complex than I expected. And, it wasn't shot like Fogel was trying to prove something. It's almost like the action was inconsequential to her, but if she was going to have it, she was going to do it well.
I thought The Spy Who Dumped Me was a blast. I don't know that it's something that I'll be banging the drum for by the end of the year, but it's refreshingly different from most comedies that I see while still being an accessible mainstream comedy. Even more so than Ghostbusters, this confirms to me that Kate McKinnon has a future in movies whenever she leaves SNL. It also reminded me how much I like Mila Kunis. The supporting cast isn't quite as strong, partly due to the film's tendency to kill characters off before you'd expect. This was a good way to start August off.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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