The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) Review!!!

Synopsis – Audrey and Morgan are best friends who unwittingly become entangled in an international conspiracy when one of the women discovers the boyfriend who dumped her was actually a spy.

My Take – For every James Bond, Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible film, there are counter in the form of Austin Powers, Johnny English and to some extend director Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman films. However, as the last two decades have become more susceptible to female representation, newer agents have become female, both in the serious espionage dramas (Atomic Blonde, Red Sparrow) and lighter in tones (Charlie’s Angels). While female lead comedies have been notoriously know to be hit and miss most of the time, but if Melissa McCarthy’s 2015 film Spy has taught us anything, it’s that female-led espionage comedies can be hilarious.

Thankfully, this latest entry is more of a rare safe-bet, which despite not being the most original comedy on the market, manages to super funny and more violent than most spy films, all the while providing a platform for what is the film’s primary purpose, i.e. to give Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon two hours to have a good time. As spy parodies go, this Susanna Fogel directed film is one of the better ones. I mean, it’s no Spy, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most.

The story follows Audrey (Mila Kunis), a grocery store cashier, who is bumped out on her birthday owing to the fact that her boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux) dumped her by text. However, her best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon), an actress trying to make it in Hollywood, who is ever optimistic and energetic encourages her to burn the items Drew left behind as a form of starting over. Unknown to them, Drew is an actually a CIA spy, and is currently being hunted by some very dangerous people overseas, who upon receiving Audrey’s text regarding their intentions contacts her for a sit down at her place the next day. And as bullets begin to whizz by his head, he convinces Audrey and Morgan to fly to Vienna to pass his most prized possession, a 2nd place fantasy football trophy, along to his contact there, or many innocent lives will be lost.

Soon they’re on the run, and being pursued by a pair of MI6 agents Sebastian (Sam Heughan) and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj), who immediately offer to protect the women by taking over their operation on orders from their boss Wendy (Gillian Anderson), a model/gymnast/cold-blooded assassin Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno) and the usual army of leather-bound, gun-toting, knife-flashing stunt-people on motorbikes. Fleeing through Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, Audrey and Morgan find themselves in all manner of dangers.

I agree, the story itself is ludicrous, logically, there is no way you wouldn’t have face-planted at the first hurdle, but you really do have to be forgiving of these missteps if you want to enjoy yourself. It’s hard not to admit that this sophomore effort from American director Susanna Fogel, following her debut with the 2014 romantic comedy Life Partners, is funny, intelligent, and most importantly self-aware action-comedy that also touches, lightly but intelligently, on the conversation of the moment: the need to give women the credit they are due. Despite the lousy title, the film works best when McKinnon and Kunis are exploiting some enviable and believable on screen chemistry.

Trading dialogue, which I’m guessing was improvised a lot, while the guns fire and limbs are being snapped around them. While recent female led comedies like Rough Night felt the need to shoe-horn messages about women’s empowerment into their weak, weak jokes, this film is mercifully free from the usual baggage, focusing instead on nicely staged, fast-paced gags that are actually funny. The film has very few scenes that involve our characters doing nothing, leading to a well-paced film that keeps you immersed in all the shenanigans at hand. The high point in the film is a scene after our heroines narrowly avoid death and congratulate each other, agreeing not to minimize their accomplishments. It feels almost shocking because such a sequence between women is so little seen in an action film, or in any film. What’s also surprising is how excessively violent this film is, which is supposedly a play from director and co-writer Susanna Fogel by emphasizing the idea that women can play in the muck just as well as the men, for example when Morgan illustrates at one point by yelling out, “Women can be terrorists too!”

Here, director Fogel has managed to pull off some impressively choreographed battles, loaded with special effects, film magic, and that rage bending destruction that we action junkies love. Kudos to the team responsible for thinking up the stunts, for they kept it diverse and relevant to the story and not just some ploy to rope in more bucks, because in the end what matters to Audrey and Morgan is their friendship, not the number of corpses they leave in their wake. Most of the victims are villains or disposable extras, and even at the climax limits are placed on the amount of premeditated lethal force the heroines can themselves deploy, that too without any spy training.

Unfortunately, all that violence, blood splatter and some of the crudest moments is also what keeps the tone from being more consistent, as director Fogel struggles to maintain a balance. In the sense, the good intentions are there but the execution is lacking. Also there is the matter of predictability. The film never really tries to surprise when it came to twists and tricks. While the linearity is appreciated from the comedic stand point, it did take away from the story when you could predict so much from a mile away. Too much foreshadowing and not enough planning lead to some jokes getting ruined due to how obvious the next step was. T

here are also a few plot points that were boring, or full of holes that didn’t quite impress me. Much of this has to do with the random characters introduced haphazardly about midway through the film, who were not really needed and not as fleshed out as they had probably planned. I know it’s not supposed to make sense, I get it, it’s a comedy, yet the story element is still important and in need of tweaking for the next installment should they continue on with the series.

But I guess that won’t matter to most as Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon are always entertaining, and certainly look like they’re having fun. As best friends Audrey and Morgan, Kunis and McKinnon have a sparkling screen chemistry and the rhythmical pit-a-patter of their dialogue is an utter delight to witness. They crackle with a magical energy, McKinnon especially, who seems to hit the perfect note on every joke. While Kunis often has to play the straight woman to McKinnon, she steps up in the film’s action sequences. Meanwhile, McKinnon, with a blend of no-nonsense intelligence, emotional fragility and borderline insanity, is wonderful to watch.

In supporting roles, Justin Theroux is credible, Sam Heughan is very likable, while Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno is coolly terrific. In smaller roles, Gillian Anderson, Hasan Minhaj, Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser also make their marks. On the whole, ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ is a likable spy comedy that elevates itself from the usual condescending fare to be a genuinely funny and enjoyable watch.