This script is so bad, it’s laughable
THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME Director: Susanna Fogel.With Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Gillian Anderson, Hasan Minhaj, Ivanna Sakhno and Sam Heughan to wait longer for a feature that deserves her lightning-bolt comic charisma. This one leaves her, and the more restrained Kunis, as stranded as a covert operative whose cover is blown.
Fogel, whose Gillian Jacobs/ Leighton Meester comedy Life Partners found some admirers on the fest circuit, teams with TV vet David Iserson on a script that sometimes feels like an exquisite corpse – a game in which a dozen scribes wrote individual scenes, knowing only what came immediately before and after in the plot.
How else would our heroes be targeted by an elite Russian assassin in one scene and later be tortured by the same woman, her assignment now being to keep them alive until they divulge what they know?
Spy movies are always stuffed with crosses, but in this one we suspect even the film-makers can’t tell the good guys from the bad.
Kunis plays Audrey, whose relationship with Justin Theroux’s Drew ended days ago via text. She has no idea he’s in Lithuania, pulling all manner of Jason Bourne moves as he tries to evade killers. He ignores her calls and texts until McKinnon’s Morgan, trying to rescue Audrey’s self-respect, threatens to set all Drew’s possessions on fire.
Finally, he calls back, says “some bad people are after me” and begs her to delay the bonfire.
By the next day, Audrey has learned Drew works for the CIA, watched him die, and has been told she must get a cheap plastic trophy to a rendezvous in Vienna by 11 the next morning.
She and Morgan flee to the airport, where, despite being the least inconspicuous smugglers of valuable contraband in recent memory, manage to board a plane.
Things go badly at the rendezvous and the two are soon rushing all over Europe, trying to hide their identities until they can work out what to do with the inevitable USB drive they have found hidden in that trophy.
A bright spot comes when Morgan calls home for help. Her parents, played by Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser, offer a suburban respite from spy-film clichés.
McKinnon dives head first into every imbecilic scene, and Kunis stoically pretends to believe her BFF is sentient. But the movie around them is a wreck and no amount of cloak-and-dagger will keep that secret for long.