In the aftermath of Zero Dark Thirty, you’d think that any film set among the inner workings of the CIA would be a lightning rod for controversy. Not so with Paul Feig’s Spy, a gleeful, anarchic, outrageous sendup of spy-game bombast.
The fact that Feig’s presentation of the CIA’s operational compound in Langley, Va. is routinely assailed by CGI bats and mice — and that those little black specks on an office birthday cake are not chocolate sprinkles — isn’t a comment on governmental neglect or ineptitude. It’s just damn funny. Spy doesn’t “say” anything, and with blockbusters increasingly transforming into soapboxes, the movie’s torrent of apolitical gags is a welcome reprieve.
The only thing Spy is “about” is spy movies themselves, particularly the 007 brand of glamorous, globetrotting thrills. Every supporting character, from the humorless CIA chief (Allison Janney) and the exotic European villainess (Rose Byrne) to the unctuous Chechen terrorist (Bobby Cannavale) and the handsome, impeccably dressed superspy himself (Jude Law), is straight out of central casting. Jason Statham contributes a masterful satire on his usual impenetrable supermen characters, as a rogue agent who defies death daily.
The plot, concerning the transfer of a world-ending nuclear weapon for a cache of diamonds, is a ludicrous salad of MacGuffins and double-crossings and triple-crossings, tossed in a dressing of punchy one-liners and hammers pulled back on guns that we know will never fire. But just as the characters don’t know they’re cardboard constructions speaking entirely in air quotes, so too does Theodore Shapiro’s gravitas-laden score proceed without a wink. The movie even has a Bond-esque theme song, presented over the psychedelically colored credit sequence.
The only character who seems to know that she’s in a shameless, uncouth Paul Feig comedy is Melissa McCarthy’s Susan Cooper, a talented desk-bound analyst at Langley who is thrust into a field assignment to track a nuclear football device following the death of her partner. Granted a series of increasingly dowdy covers —as a pathetic single mom, a Mary Kay-selling cat lady — she hilariously fails to blend in anywhere she’s thrust, which are the usual spy-film haunts of cafés, casinos and private jets in and above Paris, Rome and Budapest. Her spyware is similarly undesirable: poison-control pills disguised as stool softener, a timepiece tracker provided in the form of a tacky Beaches watch.
McCarthy is at her seemingly improvisatory best here, mixing the incompetence of a neophyte spy with a Hulk-like ability to kick insurmountable ass when her back is against the wall. Beneath it all is an almost tragic sense of lonely desperation that emerges not so much from Feig’s writing as from McCarthy’s layered delivery of it.
You could argue that secret-agent spoofs are nothing new, and you’d be right, from Get Smart and John Huston’s Casino Royale to France’s OSS 117 franchise. But these are gentle hommages compared to Feig’s brutal Spy, which boasts a macabre sense of humor not unlike Tarantino’s. In the opening scene, When Jude Law’s agent accidentally fires a bullet through the skull of the only man who knows the location of the nuclear device, he apologizes, blaming it on a pollen allergy.
To be fair, at two solid hours, Spy runs out of steam, overstaying its welcome by a few scenes. But it’s so chockablock with inspiring comic business that it probably requires a second viewing to capture all of it. I haven’t laughed this much in a movie theater since Chris Rock’s Top Five, nearly six months ago.
Spy’s deflation of the graven self-seriousness of the Bond films is so effective that next time Daniel Craig dons a three-piece suit and orders in martini, in this fall’s Spectre, it’ll be difficult to take him seriously.
SPY. Director: Paul Feig; Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Rose Byrne, Jude Law, Bobby Cannavale, Allison Janney, Miranda Hart, Peter Serafinowicz; Distributor: 20th Century Fox; Rating: R; Opens: Today at most area theaters