Bonding moment
Melissa McCarthy gets over-the-top laughs from going undercover
Judd Apatow and Paul Feig worked together on the cult TV hit Freaks and Geeks back in 1999, and since then both have gone on to create wildly popular comedies — with an increasingly notable divergence.
Apatow’s frat-boy sensibilities pervade every corner
of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, etc. And Feig has done the same for the sororities, bringing female empowerment and gross-out humour in equal measure to
Bridesmaids, The Heat and the upcoming all-gal Ghostbusters.
Spy is very much part of that list. And while some of the film’s best performances are by men (more on Jason Statham in a minute), you could argue that it doesn’t really feature a male lead. Melissa McCarthy, Miranda Hart and Rose Byrne share the workload and leave nothing wanting.
McCarthy pl ays Susan Cooper, a deskbound CIA agent whose computer smarts make her partner-in-the-field (Jude Law) look good. In fact, he looks 007-good, even with that unconvincing American accent. But Susan’s earpiece intel can’t stop him from accidentally shooting the only guy who knows the whereabouts of that ultimate Macguffin, a black-market nuclear weapon.
But wait; the guy has a daughter, played by Byrne, whose face can somehow express five different kinds of disgust simultaneously. She not only knows where the bomb is but is prepared to take over her father’s job of selling it. Trouble is, she also knows the identity of every CIA field agent. (For the purposes of this film, the agency is a mom-and-pop operation with just four active members, led by the redoubtable Allison Janney.)
Enter Susan Cooper, who volunteers to go into the field. No one knows her face, and no one’s going to suspect the face of Melissa McCarthy, especially when it’s topped with a bad wig, accompanied by a worse sweater, and yoked to the identity of a divorced, cat-loving homemaker.
So off she goes, with office pal Nancy (Hart) now providing the voice in her ear — conscience and good sense, mostly, but also vital information as to the whereabouts of evildoers. Arriving in Rome, she’s also aided (if you can call it that) by local lothario Aldo, played by Peter Serafinowicz, single-handedly pushing Italian stereotypes back 30 years — and he’s British!
Spy runs to almost two hours, and my chief complaint is a certain shagginess to its structure. It feels as though McCarthy and company did a whole lot of improv, and Feig couldn’t bear to leave any of it in the editing suite.
That said, it’s consistently funny stuff — which brings me to Statham, in what I’m pretty sure is his first role in which he doesn’t drive. Instead, he grouses, loudly and endlessly, about his job being usurped by a woman. He lists adrenalinefueled exploits (most of which I’m pretty sure were lifted from his character in Crank) and boasts that he once had his right arm ripped off and had to sew it back on with his left one. He’s the film’s entire complement of testosterone in one hilarious package.
The film has a bit of trouble explaining Cooper’s unexpectedly solid chops in the field — a 10-year-old video of her going rogue during combat training doesn’t quite justify her subsequent quick reflexes and prowess in hand-to-hand combat. Worse, her basic temperament seems to waver, although fans of her foulmouthed cop from 2013’s The
Heat will have much to admire. But Spy, which steals shamelessly from the Bond franchise in its score, camerawork and gambling locales, isn’t trying for verisimilitude. Give Feig credit for a nice variation on the car-chase-knocking-overa-fruit-stand cliché; for a fightin-a-kitchen scene that shows how a frying pan, in addition to making a handy club, can serve as a shield; and for proving that you can have a movie with a Bond girl and no Bond to speak of.
It feels as though McCarthy and company did a whole lot of improv, and Feig couldn’t bear to leave any of it