Hit-and-miss espionage affair with a ditzy duo
SOME of the funniest films to come out of Hollywood in the past five years have been action comedies featuring female comedians, such as Spy, the hilarious espionage spoof starring Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart.
The Spy Who Dumped Me is firmly in this mould, except it replaces the peerless McCarthy and Hart with Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon so it has less than 50 per cent of the laughs.
The action begins when Kunis, playing a jaded 30- year- old, discovers that the boyfriend who’s just chucked her (Justin Theroux) is a CIA operative.
One thing leads to another and before long Kunis and her best friend (McKinnon) embark on a whistle- stop tour of European capitals to deliver a stolen zip drive to an undercover agent.
On the way they encounter an implausibly handsome MI6 officer (Sam Heughan), an Eastern European gymnast assassin (Ivanna Sakhno) and an ageing Lothario (Fred Melamed) who tries to seduce McKinnon by asking her what she thinks of Balzac. ‘Less and less with every experience,’ she says.
To make that joke work, Melamed has to pronounce the first syllable of ‘Balzac’ so it rhymes with ‘fall’ rather than ‘pal’ — and if I tell you that it’s one of the more solid gags in the film you’ll get a sense of just how many fall flat. The Spy Who Dumped Me keeps the jokes coming at a milea-minute and they miss the target almost as often as Kunis and McKinnon do when they’re firing their guns. But just enough of them land to make the film quite amusing.
ALPHA is set 10,000 years ago and, according to the portentous voiceover by Morgan Freeman, documents the historical moment when early man first decided to domesticate dogs.
The man in question is actually a boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and he befriends the dog when he finds himself stranded hundreds of miles from home by a father (Johannes Haukur Johannesson) who’s written him off for dead.
What follows is an arduous trek across a hostile wilderness — a children’s version of The Revenant. The cinematography is breathtaking and Smit-McPhee gives a solid performance, but the sense of being on an epic adventure never quite takes flight, perhaps because it lacks a villain.
LUIS And The Aliens is an animated feature about a neglected boy saved from being carted off to the orphanage when three aliens touch down yards from his home.
It’s the kind of thing young children might enjoy, but God help any adults who have to sit through it alongside them.
Best thing about it is its running time of less than 90 minutes.