The past few weeks have been good to feminist cinema. We had Charlize Theron and her band of wives kicking ass through the desert hellscape of Mad Max: Fury Road. There was Anna Kendrick and the Barton Bellas being all Girl Power and hysterical in the southern academic hellscape of Pitch Perfect 2. And now we’ve got newbie spy Melissa McCarthy and a bunch of other funny ladies being spies and taking the lead in the traditionally misogynist world of spy thrillers in a movie called, umm, Spy.
In the film, a roguish James Bond-type CIA agent played by Jude Law is killed in the line of duty and Law’s handler/personal assistant McCarthy volunteers to apprehend his killer (played by Rose Byrne) as well as preventing the sale of a nuclear device to nere-do-well terrorists. It’s at this point that the men mostly take a back seat and we enter into a girl power fest where women are doing all of the work and kicking enough ass to give boot prints to every donkey in the northern hemisphere. There are some fantastic supporting turns especially from Peter Serafinowicz as an Italian agent trying to sex up McCarthy and Allison Janney as the humorless Deputy Director of the CIA. But the true revelation here is Jason Statham. Let’s try something real quick: raise your hand if you knew this guy could be so funny.
Anyone? No one? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Sure, the Crank series was fun, but he was basically playing a straight man in a mad, mad (mad, mad) world. Here, he’s allowed to let his comic flag fly and makes the absolute most of it.
As long as we’re on the topic of comedy, let’s talk about that for a tick, Ok? Ok. This is an Action-Comedy and while it does have a great deal of comedy the action tends to win out which is cool because the action is incredibly well directed. My issue comes with director Paul Feig and his handling of that second aspect. This is probably a bit of a controversial statement, but I don’t really like Feig’s movies. I think he crafts a tight and compelling script and gets great performances out of his cast, but I’ve always felt that his comedic timing is just a bit off. That’s the general sense I had throughout Bridesmaids and I got the same vibe through the majority of Spy. His jokes just don’t hit as hard on screen as I’m sure they do on the page, and yes, I am aware that I am the only person who holds this opinion, thanks for reminding me. Its just one of those kinda little things that keeps me from loving a film that I really did like quite a lot.
Spy is a movie that excels at not only being a parody of a globe-trotting espionage thriller, but also succeeds at being a fantastic entry to that very same genre. If you really need to know how good this movie is, just notice that I’ve gotten this far and barely even mentioned McCarthy’s top notch starring role. Spy has more than enough material to spread around to its vast array of mostly female talent and I for one couldn’t be happier, both for this singular cinema going experience and for the culture of Hollywood over all. Now let’s all start a kickstarter to get Statham into the next Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg movie.
P.S. This may be the most petty and inconsequential gripe of all time, but I HATED the ending credits. The cast’s names kept switching sides of the screen and there were ‘splosions and shit that looked like they were from a YouTube parody of a Michael Bay movie. There were some funny jokes scattered in the margins, but it was just such a pain to look at that it almost didn’t matter.
