A spy comedy that goes violently wrong

The Spy Who Dumped Me is a silly action comedy aimed primarily at a female market on a girls night out.

Mira Kunis, as Audrey, and motor-mouth comedienne Kate McKinnon, of American comedy TV series Saturday Night Live fame, as Morgan, attempt to outdo each other in this vacuous, buddy romp.

McKinnon’s performance is so overdone that her unappealing character loses focus well before the end, degenerating into a bizarre and vulgar roller-coaster of cheap laughs.

Director and co-writer Susanna Fogel invest the movie with a high-spirited, comedy veneer, as if everything is hilarious even when people are getting killed at every turn and the central characters are in constant peril.

But the key here is nobody cares about Audrey and Morgan who find themselves over their heads in trouble as they hop from one glamorous location to another. The Spy Who Dumped Me is never remotely serious, and yet it isn’t funny either. The splurge of violence adds a sour edge. Death is not a big joke and this sourness affects the comedy. It’s a production that tries to be cheerful but, in essence, is misguided and even ugly; an odious exercise in a genre delivered without conviction, a title in search of a movie.

Justin Theroux plays the spy, and Kunis gets dumped by him. She has no idea that her handsome boyfriend is a spy until some mean people turn up and begin shooting at her. She links up with her best friend Morgan (McKinnon) and the two escape to Vienna on a mission.

There’s a bloody shootout in one of those beautifully ornate cafés but no tension in the action. It’s simply unpleasant. There is nothing amusing in watching Kunis dodging bullets for most of this sorry escapade. In the end, this can be summed up as a leaden and violent movie starring two surprisingly unfunny individuals, one trying way too hard and the other not trying at all.