Kate McKinnon kills in ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me.’
But the rest of this comedy is dead on arrival
Let’s start with the good news, because there’s less of it: “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is the comedy that proves that the special thing that Kate McKinnon has, the comic originality that has made her the best thing on “Saturday Night Live,” can translate onto the big screen.
After “Ghostbusters,” there had been some question. Her overdone performance in that film was so extreme that one had to wonder if maybe she was a brilliant sketch artist, but unable to sustain a character over a full-length film. But here she’s a delight, finding opportunities for comedy whenever possible, yet easing up just enough to keep it real.
But McKinnon is really the only source for comedy in the entire film, or at least the only source for laughs. Director and co-writer Susanna Fogel invests the movie, which also stars Mila Kunis, with an aura of high spirits, as if everything were hilarious. Meanwhile, people are getting killed all over the place, and the central characters are in constant peril.
This kind of movie — the action comedy — is trickier than it seems, because the goals are seemingly at cross-purposes. Viewers must be worried about the protagonists, even as they know the main characters are guaranteed to come out all right. They must take the action seriously enough to become absorbed in it, as well as to accept a hefty body count. Yet they have to maintain enough distance to accept the movie in comic terms.
The way to succeed is not to walk a thin line between comedy and drama, but to go big in both directions — that is, to make the comedy funny, and yet to play it completely straight when presenting the dramatic circumstances behind the action. Once filmmakers understand that, they can sometimes even be funny and scary in the same moment, as when Dennis Farina, as a mob boss in “Midnight Run,” tells one of his men he’s going to stab him in the head with a pencil.
Ridiculous line, but you know this guy’s crazy enough to do it.
Justin Theroux is the spy, and Kunis is Audrey, the one who gets dumped — she’s dumped before the movie starts. We see the spy, in an early scene, creating a bloodbath in some foreign country, but she has no idea that he does that sort of thing, until he comes back and tells her. That’s when people start shooting at her, too, and her friend Morgan (McKinnon), and the two women have to escape to Vienna to complete a mission.
There’s a shootout in a caféthat’s about as bloody as the bar scene in “Inglourious Basterds,” but there’s no tension in watching it. It’s just unpleasant. Kunis is entirely wasted.
Perhaps someone zanier in the role might have been better, but perhaps not. In any case, there’s nothing funny about watching her get shot at.
By the way, in an early scene, the McKinnon character meets a guy from Ukraine and asks him, “Is it called ‘Ukraine’ or ‘The Ukraine’?” And the guy answers, “Either.” That’s bizarre for two reasons. The first is that only USSR-nostalgic Russians refer to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” because the “the” implies that Ukraine is a region, not an independent nation. And the second is that Kunis is from Ukraine, so they had someone standing right there who knew that that was the wrong answer.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” takes the wrong approach by trying to split the difference between comedy and action. It is never remotely serious, and yet for the most part it isn’t funny, either. The violence gives the movie a sour edge, because it feels as though it’s presenting death as a big joke. And that sourness impacts the comedy. The result is a movie that feels cheerful and yet misguided and even slightly ugly, an exercise in genre without conviction, a title in search of a movie.
But McKinnon is still funny. There’s that.