Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon Hard Spy – Variety

Has there ever been a comedy action where the action has turned comedy as it does in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"? The eye-catching example is "Beverly Hills Cop II", and it was a mischief bullshit machismo disaster of the 80s, a betrayal of mouthy mouthy Eddie Murphy brought to light. ;original. "The Spy Who Dumped Me" is not a debacle, but it's an over-the-top and strangely combustible entertainment, a film that can not decide if it wants to be a hug from light comedy or heavy exercise in B

Audrey (Mila Kunis), a New Jersey cashier with brown hair and an unsafe attitude, and Morgan (Kate McKinnon), her fair feminist BFF, find themselves in the middle cuddly Ballistic espionage after it turns out that Audrey's absent boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), is a cut-throat agent working for the CIA. Before the story begins to roll, we see it in action, piercing walls and sending continental henchmen and jumping out the window on a truck in one take worthy of Tom Cruise to his greatest stroke of luck . This could almost be the prelude to a Jason Statham movie, and the audience thinks: "Okay, they must try to put us in the mood."

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Once Drew is shot in front of Audrey, she and Morgan are trying to fulfill his mission by taking the parcel he was carrying and flying to Vienna to deliver it to his contact at a cafe. We still think the film is preparing us for a gallop: the female version of a farce by Will Ferrell, or perhaps a cousin to crime comedies like "Spies" or "The Heat". Not that "The spy who has ousted me" had to follow these formulas – he absolutely has the right to be his own thing.

But what a thing! The lines of laughter arrive at the right time, but most of the time, they do not fit in completely like a comedy (more like a filler), because the picture is so leaning on extravagance from a straight chaos. This Vienna café, for example, explodes into a bloody free-for-all (machine guns, daggers, bodies that collapse), and the key sign of what we expect occurs at the brutal reward, when a man is seen dipping in a pot of fondue – and this is not, repeat not a joke. It's just a cool way to kill someone. (It would have been funnier if Jason Statham had done it.)

"The spy who unloaded me" has knife fights and car chases, double crosses and Betrayal, a Euro-trot structure that takes our heroines from Vienna to Paris to Prague, Berlin, a handsome and superb agent (Sam Heughan), a Russian assassin (Ivanna Sakhno) who looks like an eyebrow gymnast android Invisible, a highlight of Cirque du Soleil with Morgan on a trapeze, and more jibber-jabber than you can stand about a flash drive that contains information that will save countless lives. There are a dozen gun shots for each laugh, but taken in its own terms, the film is far from incompetent – if "Die Hard" at mid-period is your standard. It's hard to invest a lot in everything we see, but at least one dimension of "The Spy Who's Dumped Me" is fully alive, and that's Kate's performance McKinnon. There are times when she saves the movie.

The proverbial danger for any "Saturday Night Live" artist trying to happen on the big screen, is that they will sound too superficial and light, too bogged down in too late personality twitches by night. Yet, McKinnon, in "The Spy That Me Has Vanquished", comes out of the warmed ghetto of "SNL". She plays Morgan as a post-# MeToo renegade, and there's nothing harmless or cute about her comic attack. With her fiercely open eyes and hungry smile and sarcastic delivery, McKinnon is like Bette Davis channeling Fran Lebowitz. When she is introduced to Wendy (Gillian Anderson), a major MI6 domo, she says, "You are the boss, and you have not sacrificed an ounce of femininity." McKinnon knows how to play a line like this to that it cuts in two directions at once: she thinks it, but she also sends her own look on that! the bitches can really have everything boosterism. His sarcastic sincerity is a tonic that stings.

Brandishing an attitude like that, and with the right vehicle, Kate McKinnon could reign in the movies. But "The Spy Who Dumped Me" is not that vehicle. It's a new kind of concoction of sister-power action, and the director and co-writer, Susanna Fogel, is showing undeniable audacity in refusing to make the comedy too goofy-girly- coy. Yet, "The Spy who unloaded me" is so loaded with very heavy generic parts that it never establishes the kind of open air area in which laughter could s & # 39; fly.

At one point, our heroines land in an apartment that they think is a haven of peace, but their host, played by the ever-delectable Fred Melamed, turns out to be an enemy spy. Yet, it is absurdly debonair. When he looks at Morgan with a raised eyebrow and asks, "Are you a lover of Balzac ?", She answers, "Less and less, with every experience." I would have traded all the overbuilt thriller-package of "The Spy That Unloaded Me" for half a dozen jokes that crazily old-school-crazy foolishness.