Also caught The Spy Who Dumped Me, a new action comedy starring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon. Based on the trailers, I went into this expecting little and was mildly surprised… at least for the first hour.
The film stars Kunis as a woman dating a man who just dumped her… that man turns out to be a spy who has left a McGuffin (a flash drive with top secret info on it) in her possession. Soon, the CIA, MI6, and terrorists are after her to get it back. With her buddy McKinnon along for the ride, they hopscotch across Europe, one step ahead of the spies and agents.
This film shares a lot with the Melissa McCarthey movie Spy. They are both about women out of their league in an otherwise straight-up spy film, they both have pretty convincing action scenes, and they are both very rated R for language and excessive for-comedy bloody violence. Spy is ultimately a more consistently funny and better structured film though.
The first hour of this two hour flick is pretty good. I laughed – or at least chuckled – fairly often. The movie was working… until the last hour where it started to run out of steam. This movie is easily thirty minutes too long and its so stretched thin, the comedy just kind of peters out. With a severe amount of editing to trim down some overly long and often time-filling scenes, this movie would have been a stronger recommendation.
As is, it’s fairly enjoyable and if you like Kunis and McKinnon doing their thing, you might like it well enough to justify catching it at the theaters. It works well also as a female buddy film that may inherently appeal to ladies more than gentlemen.
So, yeah, the long and short of it is, this is half a good movie and half a struggling, kind of tedious movie. I really wish I enjoyed it more but I can’t claim I didn’t laugh (or chuckle) just enough to save it. This is a reserved recommendation.
Score: 74