Must Spy harder

Update: Oh dear, no new posts since I got back from my honeymoon. In my defence, I’ve been trying to write a novel, a process which mostly involves finding new ways to procrastinate from actually sitting down to write a novel. I’ve found that buying a house, moving house and decorating a new house work quite well in that regard.

Anyway, free movie preview time!

There is so much depressing stuff on the internet (or at least the parts of the internet that men tend to visit) about how women aren’t funny, and how dare these silly tarts be starring in comedy films when there are more than enough male comics to do the job.

One of the leaders of the fightback, ironically, is Paul Feig, who directed arguably the best mainstream comedy of recent years in Bridesmaids, and who always features women in promenant roles, including his upcoming all-girl Ghostbusters remake (which would blatantly be SO much better with Sandler or Ferrell in it, right lads?). Melissa McCarthy seems to be his major muse, and now in Spy she has been elevated to a deserved leading role.

We kick off with her CIA operative Susan working as a put-upon office drone, doing all the hard work (reconaissance, remote drone operation, being a human sat nav) while ‘her’ operative (Jude Law) does all the fun James Bond stuff on the ground. Imagine if Bond didn’t have a clue what he was doing and was relying on step-by-step earpiece instructions.

The opening scenes are quite good-natured and gentle spy spoofery. As an sympathetic schlub, Susan contrasts well with McCarthy’s usual brash onscreen persona. Meanwhile there’s a nice supporting cast: Allison Janney as her boss, and her colleagues include Miranda Hart playing, well, Miranda, and best of all, Jason Statham playing a fantatistically arrogant – and utterly delusional – version of the standard Stath action stud.

For various convoluted reasons, Susan has to quit the desk job and go undercover on an ostensibly simple tracking mission. It’s a decent setup - a nice, non-sweary lady afraid of guns whose cusses are of the Gosh Darn It variety forced to tap into her dormant CIA badass skills and go full-on Secret Agent when things inevitably go wrong, in order to save the world from a nuclear bomb, or something like that (as in all spy films, the why is not terribly important).

Unfortunately, Feig’s idea of Susan gaining her stripes is not just for her to become a kick-ass spy, but to turn into a brash, potty-mouthed asshole as part of her undercover guise. In other words, McCarthy reverts back to her regular foul-mouthed big screen self. The effing and jeffing quota in Spy rises exponentially as it goes on, and what started off as amusing when it was just Jason Statham being hilariously inappropriate descends into fairly tedious rude insult battles and general vulgarity.

On top of this, and in common with most modern action spoofs, Spy wants to have its cake and eat it by having its own blood-soaked action sequences (which, if the target is Bond movies, are substantially more graphic than those films, thus rendering the violence a lot less effective). These are servicably done, but by the concluding fights and shootouts the film’s tone has changed so much that you may as well be watching a standard action flick with a few dirty jokes thrown in.

This was all very disappointing to me, although the fact that there was healthy laughter in the cinema the whole way through suggests that Spy will find an audience less bothered about missed opportunities and the crassness of modern comedies. Hey, if I wanted sentimentality I should have watched a Disney film, right?

Still, all Spy proves in the war on misogynist trolls is that women can do foul-mouthed, lowbrow humour just as well as men. It feels like a rather hollow victory.