Well, it felt like just yesterday that Infinity War ruined 2018 for plenty of children at the end of April, and, in what felt like a flash, we’ve now arrived at the August doldrums, where studios dump their potentially-still-profitable risks to an audience whose main concerns are whether or not the air conditioning is on or if the slushee machine is working. So enters Susanna Fogel’s The Spy Who Dumped Me, a fun if frustrating little spy comedy that takes one of our best working comedians — SNL shining star Kate McKinnon — and allows her to play off of Mila Kunis and her particular brand of laconic comedy. Fogel certainly cast her film well enough, and I’m willing to bet that most of the people in attendance will be there for McKinnon, and they’ll be thusly rewarded. While not the most impressive showcase of the actor’s talents, it’ll scratch that late summer itch for a solid laugh in a cool environment, even if it’s a bit too much like your average Bond movie (at least in length) for its own good.
Audrey (Kunis) is a perfectly normal 30-something, drifting through her “unremarkable” life after an abrupt text message break-up with her boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux, who is just a bit too old to be playing this part believably) weeks before. Her best friend Morgan (McKinnon) throws her a birthday party that seems to put everything into focus for her: she needs to move past Drew and, in doing so, she needs to get rid of the few final things of his that are clogging up her apartment. Right as she and Morgan are about to burn his shit, he gets in touch with her for the first time in weeks, letting her know that he’s coming back to grab his things. Anyways, long story short, Drew is a CIA assassin who had left some highly valuable information hidden in his things at Audrey’s that many very bad people want and definitely shouldn’t have. When Drew is seemingly killed in a shoot-out in Audrey’s apartment, the women are tasked with his dying breath to get to Europe and find a safe home for the information. He tells them not to trust anyone, and they take that to heart, for the most part. Along the way, they’re pursued by Sebastian (Outlander’s Sam Heughan), Drew’s handsome former partner, who might be a little less gruff than he lets on, and they’ll travel across the continent trying to fulfill Drew’s dying wish.
As with all improv-based comedies, there are occasional strikeouts, and occasionally the entire set-piece falls to that particular alchemy. A sequence where McKinnon and Kunis have to prove to a Russian assassin, in order to escape torture, that they don’t keep secrets from one another and then proceed to spill every secret that they’ve divulged to one another in the past few years is weirdly grating — you’d expect with that kind of pair that they’d be able to play off one another stronger — but those moments are well concealed by strong writing. McKinnon gets most of the film’s best lines, including one where she refers to a Ukrainian hook-up’s uncut and flaccid wiener as looking like an “uncooked crescent roll,” and is generally the whole reason to see the film. Kunis, while not unfunny, gets the main perk of the straight-man role: a vague but roughly fulfilling emotional arc, that sees her go from Theroux’s underachieving girlfriend to a strong and confident woman in her own right. It’s an arc you’ve seen a billion times, but there’s an inherent satisfaction in seeing baddies get their comeuppance by this unlikely pair of action stars duo.
Fogel has some action chops — significantly more so than a number of her contemporaries in the B action world — and each of her sequences with Heughan has an oddly extreme brutality to it. Sure, it’s a lot like The Hitman’s Bodyguard in that it relies on a lot of “Ain’t it great to kill” cannon fodder, but Kunis and McKinnon ground it enough that that the whole endeavor has less the flavor of sociopathy than it does parody. Even the truly outrageous bits — and I don’t mean for your average gutter-level gore-enjoying fuckheads like myself — feel more jokey than not (Kunis’ solution to a phone’s fingerprint scanner proves to be the most silly and entertaining of these bits). All of that action goodwill comes close to being spoiled by a fiercely stupid finale, which combines two of my least favorite things: Cirque de Soleil and a bit of a dumb and unsatisfying twist (that you can see coming from a mile away). Fogel’s set-piece fails her here, and the cross-cutting between McKinnon’s high-wire antics and Kunis’ personal revelations is slow and awkward.
At a meaty two hours, The Spy Who Dumped Me is just a bit too long to be either the gory farce that it shows hints of being throughout or the stakes-laden buddy comedy that its characters seem to be plucked from, but it’s not bad, working more often than it doesn’t. Bloat is par for the course in the spy genre (just look at Mission Impossible: Fallout, which has fooled enough people with its breathless final thirty minutes for them to forget about the talk-heavy two hours that preceded it) but in the case of this particular type of parody, less is often more. And, honestly, this movie ends in a place that I would have preferred that it started in, and the promise of a looser, action-focused sequel is one of the reasons I hope you’ll run out and see this movie this weekend. There’s a lot of potential with this ensemble, and if our only alternative to dour Bond and Tom Cruise’s increasingly elaborate suicide attempts is an occasionally shaggy and overlong but genuinely fun action-comedy, I hope they make 50 more of these.