Silly satire awaits in superspy thriller
The humour includes enough slapstick and gross-out gags to keep the kids entertained, but there are clever callbacks and meta-jokes for older audiences to chuckle at
Spies in Disguise
(out of 4) Voiced by Will Smith, Tom Holland, Ben Mendelsohn and Rashida Jones. Directed by Troy Quane and Nick Bruno. 103 minutes. Opens Wednesday at theatres everywhere. STC
To all appearances, the animated comedy “Spies in Disguise” is just another a rollicking sendup of superspy thrillers. As befits a movie about clandestine activity, however, there’s more than meets the eye here.
Hidden beneath its parodistic action-comedy exterior is a message, one that doesn’t set out to merely lampoon the genre but to playfully question almost everything about it.
“When we fight fire with fire, we all get burned,” says Walter Beckett (voiced by the ever-endearing Tom Holland). Walter is a neurotic gadgets expert tasked with outfitting Lance Sterling (a sufficiently suave Will Smith), the star operative for a U.S. government spy agency known, aptly enough, as the Agency. Within its Washington, D.C., headquarters, built deep beneath the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Walter alienates the other members of his tech team by working on contraptions that could only be called … pacifist. Think adorably distracting glitter bombs, a lavender-scented truth serum and a very serious take on silly string.
He’s an eccentric version of MI6’s Q, and first-time directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno clearly know their James Bond tropes. Lance checks most of these boxes, with his sleek suit, tricked-out luxury car, quippy persona and comically chiseled jaw line. The slick opening credits sequence, set to the Mark Ronson and the Last Artful, Dodgr jam “Freak of Nature,” is straight out of the 007 playbook as well.
For a world-class spy, however, Bond always has been extraordinarily bad at going unnoticed and the same could be said for the punch-happy Lance. When Killia n (Ben Mendelsohn), a villain with a robotic arm and a grudge, frames Lance for treason, the Agency puts a no-nonsense internal affairs agent (Rashida Jones) and her amusing aides (Karen Gillan and DJ Khaled) on the spy’s trail.
Lance subsequently turns to Walter, who has an appropriately insane solution, a serum that transforms our hero into that most inconspicuous of creatures: a pigeon. Lance, who hastily downs the concoction without knowing its purpose, isn’t particularly pleased with his new appearance, and the film revels in the absurdity of this human-to-avian body swap.
“Spies in Disguise” then turns into a buddy movie as Walter and his now-feathered friend elude capture and thwart Killian’s evil plan, which involves a drone assault that must have been dreamed up after a Marvel movie marathon.
The humour includes enough slapstick and gross-out gags to keep the kids entertained, but there are clever callbacks and meta-jokes for older audiences to chuckle at as well. Although an early “Kill Bill”-tinged sequence romanticizes the pleasures of a good, old-fashioned onscreen scrap, the rest of the shrewd set pieces are about finding “a good way to stop the bad,” as Walter puts it.
Screenwriters Brad Copeland and Lloyd Taylor, who loosely adapted “Spies in Disguise” from the 2009 short film “Pigeon: Impossible,” anchor the story around the refreshingly subversive theme of non-violence, as the movie finds increasingly inventive ways to visualize Walter’s whimsical approach to spycraft.
Before launching its globetrotting adventure, “Spies in Disguise” finds grounding in a sweetly sentimental prologue in which a young Walter is shown tinkering with devices designed to protect his police officer mother (Rachel Brosnahan).
Walter knows his ideas are peculiar, but his mom emphasizes the value of thinking outside the box. “What’s wrong with weird?” she asks. “The world needs weird.”
“Spies in Disguise” is also kind of weird and that’s why it works.