Full-figured empowerment.
The Paul Feig/Melissa McCarthy comedy onslaught that began with Bridesmaids continues to crush everything in its path with this femme-centric parody of James Bond and Mission: Impossible-like high jinks. McCarthy gets top billing this time out, and although her CIA analyst-cum-inadvertent superspy feels somewhat less brazenly comedic than her previous outings, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments to make this one of the better yuk-fests of the early summer movie season.
All involved would have been better served had the two-hour running time been shorn to a tight 90 minutes. Feig, who also wrote, opens fire with a veritable fusillade of gags, visual and otherwise, some of which hit their marks dead-on while many others ricochet off their intended targets or just plain fizzle out. Still, the cast is uniformly on-board for some seriously bizarro, against-type hilarity, foregrounding McCarthy’s initially mousy Susan Cooper against a range of talent that runs from Jason Statham’s clueless been-there, done-that braggart Rick Ford to Peter Serafinowicz’s endlessly scene-stealing, perpetually horny Italian ally Aldo (who recalls no one so much as Christopher Walken’s critically suave SNL character, The Continental).
The plot is little more than a mishmash of spy movie tropes — a briefcase nuke stolen by Rose Byrne’s statuesque, Russian-y villainess; opulent European settings; roaring sports car daredevilry; Jude Law’s unflappability — but that’s really beside the point. Feig and McCarthy’s completely possible mission here is to generate laughs and transform Agent Cooper from a frumpy, lovesick Langley-basement operative into a full-fledged ass-kicking, world-saving icon of full-figured female empowerment, with chuckles galore. In that, Spy succeeds with flying colors. If it’s not as satisfyingly wacky as the downright Dadaist 1984 spy parody high-water mark Top Secret, well, what is? This is a different sort of comedy that more or less succeeds on its own terms, despite that fact that you find yourself rooting for the post-Snowden CIA.
