The Spy Who Dumped Me

The Spy Who Dumped Me had me with the trailer, because Kate McKinnon was the best thing in the Ghostbusters remake, and I was happy to show up and see what else she could do. Having recently been described as “anarchy in a can” I feel a certain kinship for people who act first, and think so differently that it really don’t matter than much when they do the thinking.

And it’s a fun movie. The front half of it in particular, which is just more and more things going wrong without any really coherent explanation. The back half of it stumbes a bit on trying to tie all the things back together into some kind of a plot, which is a mistake. More stupidity would have been both funnier and and more true to the spirit the movie was setting up.

When the movie works, it works because the leads work. Mila Kunis has become very good at portraying reasonably smart women who can’t quite get it together, and there’s something completely believable in the way that she responds to each new bit of idiocy; Mila has a great “And this now?” face. The idiocy is coming thick and fast too. On the one hand, her best friend is the kind of person who seems like a lot of fun to watch from a safe distance, and on the other hand her ex-boyfriend was a creep with dangerous friends. And yet, you can see how Kate and Mila have stuck together despite the idiocy. I could watch them bickering good-naturedly and making things worse all day. Their friendship makes sense, even when nothing else does.

Meanwhile, the who spy side of things is joltingly crunchy. Most spy spoofs either don’t have the budget for proper stunts, or think that gritty violence would sour the mood. This one definitely had the money, and they didn’t spend it on donuts. The fights are downright nasty, and the body count is as ludicrous as a mainstream movie. Don’t get too attached to comic relief characters; they tend to end their scenes with a messy headshot. Or get crunched into a grungy hostel floor before getting their thumb cut off and put in a lipstick container so that the movie can get a Chekhov’s thumb gag later on. 

Does this pass the Bechdel test? Man I don’t even know any more. On the one hand, it’s a movie with two strong female leads, directed by a woman, talking non stop; on the other hand, a lot of the time they’re talking about things which men have been doing, and there’s a sense in which it does all wind up being about which of a couple of men to trust. On the other other hand, it’s a spoof spy movie; just how much do you want from a dumb movie anyway? At least it felt like a film where women had had some chance to kick the worst bits off the script and make the dialogue sound like the kinds of things which women might say to each other.

And in a move which suggests that she’s entering the Helen Mirren phase of her career, Gillian Anderson shows up in a cameo to class things up and generally make everyone look like they're barely keeping up with whatever game she’s playing. That’s one bit that I think worked exactly the way they planned it.