Mark Reviews Movies: THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2018

The Spy Who Dumped Me, a mildly amusing and surprisingly violent comedy, heavily relies on the charms of Mila Kunis and the frantic comic energy of Kate McKinnon. Granted, these are fairly safe bets. Kunis has a way of surprising you with how funny she can be within her natural and often laid-back persona. McKinnon, as has been thoroughly and regularly established by her previous work, is a comedic force of nature, capable of making just about anything funny with a slight adjustment of the intonation of a single word or simple look on her face.

The pairing works quite well, as the two play best friends who become caught up in an international conspiracy involving agile spies, no-nonsense intelligence agencies, and a group of terrorists who have infiltrated those agencies in order to execute their evil plan. That plan is so unimportant that I'm not entirely convinced the movie ever reveals it in any straightforward way. It might have something to do with hacking the entire internet, but its success definitely requires a flash drive, which eventually makes its way into the nether regions of Kunis' character.

When the primary goal is comedy, it's easy enough for filmmakers to overlook something that would seem so vital to the plot. The primary goal of the screenplay by director Susanna Fogel and David Iserson is most assuredly comedy. Barely a thing happens here without some kind of joke going along with it.

The story's MacGuffin ends up inside Audrey (Kunis). An extended chase, in which bad guys shoot a car with Audrey and her best friend Morgan (McKinnon) in it, ends with Audrey assuring their now-dead driver that they'll give him a good rating on the app. Even as the two are about to tortured by a gymnast-turned-terrorist, there's a lengthy, seemingly improvised list of secrets that the two friends know about each other.

This is neither a satire of nor a spoof on the spy thriller. It plays its plot and its requisite action sequences fairly straight, although just about every other character within those genre trappings is a joke in some way.

There's Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), the acrobatic assassin, whose stone face only cracks when she realizes that she has never had a friendship quite like the one between our heroes (At least, that's how it seems, until she reveals that she might be getting teary-eyed over her one, true friendship with an inanimate object). There's Duffer (Hasan Minhaj), a CIA agent who can't go two minutes without pointing out the fact that he went to Harvard (A very funny detail later in the movie shows that his email signature even includes that fact). On the straight-faced side, there's Drew (Justin Theroux), the eponymous spy who dumps Audrey via text message while on assignment. There's also Sebastian (Sam Heughan), an MI6 operative who later helps the two friends try to navigate the bureaucracy of government intelligence and the string of killers trying to stop them from getting the flash drive to safety.

The entire movie is a constant back-and-forth between the comic and the straightforward. McKinnon plays it wild, and Kunis plays it dead pan. All of the robust, bloody action sequences exist solely to thrill, but there's some punch line at the end of a particular beat or the whole sequence. The supporting cast is filled with two types: those who are a joke and those who go through the motions required by the threadbare plot.

This description might imply some sort of tonal whiplash, but for the most part, that doesn't exist here. The major exception is in the action, which is so brutal and blood-soaked that it sometimes makes us wonder if the main characters, who participate in or shrug off the carnage, are closer to sociopaths than accidental participants (To be fair, the movie does address their enthusiasm for violence at the very end).

It's all about the humor, and in that regard, the movie is decidedly scattered in its success. Kunis and McKinnon play off each other well, while playing their respective comic types with aplomb. Fogel may show some considerable skill in choreographing and capturing the action, but there's still the issue of how jarring the relative realism of those scenes is when set against the movie's jokey goals. The jokes themselves range from the two stars improvising, to semi-gross-out humor, to the infliction of grievous bodily harm, to non sequiturs (One, involving a famous hacker, is quite funny), and to a string of throwaway one-liners.

Their success almost exclusively depends on the cast, mainly the two leads. Some of the jokes land, especially early on, before the relationship between the friends becomes bogged down by the meaningless but often intrusive machinations of the plot. After that, The Spy Who Dumped Me finds itself in a decidedly hit-or-miss situation. The movie's various, erratic shifts give it too many checks in the "miss" column.

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