Spy review – uproarious Paul Feig comedy tickles SXSW
Celebrated for Bridesmaids and with his all-female Ghostbusters in production, Paul Feig’s directorial career seems like a constant rebuke to the late Christopher Hitchens’ notorious claim that women aren’t funny. His forthcoming film Spy, which was screened at SXSW on Sunday night in advance of its release in May, was an even more convincing argument, making the audience howl so loudly that it was hard to hear some of the lines.
(Biggest laugh? Perhaps the extreme gross-out of star Melissa McCarthy sending a henchman backwards off a balcony and impaling him on a railing below, then vomiting in horror over his corpse. OK, no one said this film would be subtle.)
McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, an office-bound CIA operative, who in the film’s prologue we see directing Bond-style spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) around a mansion in search of a nuclear bomb, warning him of the goons and villains around him he can’t see – but she can, on her computer. When Fine is assassinated by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), an icily glamorous villain with gravity-defying hair, Cooper demands that she be allowed into the field to avenge his death.
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Her bosses are sceptical: after all, though she is great at her job, she is middle-aged and frumpy. Spy is smart and funny about society’s assumptions about older women. There’s a scene where Cooper and her colleague Nancy (played by the UK’s Miranda Hart) complain that the service in a smart bar is terrible, only for a younger and more glamorous colleague to get served immediately.
Instead of a battery of hi-tech gadgets, she gets poison darts and pepper spray disguised as things a middle-aged woman is expected to carry – a spray for a fungal infection, stool-softening pills, wipes for piles. As for her undercover outfit: “I look like someone’s homophobic aunt.”
That said, Spy never clambers on a soapbox, all the more subversive for making its points through jokes. Jason Statham sends up his meathead roles in a ton of terrible British gangster flicks; Cooper refers to her fists as Cagney and Lacey and asks Boyanov: “Did they make you dress like a slutty dolphin trainer?” And when the arms dealer played by Bobby Cannavale announces his plot to blow up New York within weeks, he adds: “So if you haven’t seen Phantom …” McCarthy’s mastery of slapstick is also confirmed when Cooper attempts to make a getaway on one of those mopeds with a roof, popular in continental Europe.
The plot doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but in that it is merely being faithful to its source material – innumerable spy flicks down the ages. Spy confirms Feig’s and McCarthy’s instinct for both the zeitgeist and the funnybone, and is sure to ramp up anticipation for Ghostbusters even higher – as well as being a delight in its own right.