Paul Feig, the Michelangelo Antonioni to Melissa McCarthy’s Monica Vitti, gives the world another scatological laughfest in “Spy.”
The plot of the film is something inconsequential about nuclear annihilation (though it’s been awhile since the Chechens were picked as a big threat to global safety). The CIA puts their best male agents on the case and they display an unhinged and preening chauvinism that will be familiar to fans of TV’s “Archer.” Jude Law is unctuous and over-reliant on repeating suave spy lines, Jason Statham is a wackadoodle klutz, insistent that there is a “Face/Off” machine he can use after his cover is blown and perhaps most enjoyably of all, there’s Peter Serafinowicz as Aldo, a groping Italian fellow who might be a double agent or an honest schizophrenic.
In “Spy,” as in life, a degree of competence emerges when women run the show. CIA head Allison Janney decides to move McCarthy’s character, Susan Cooper, from her desk job to the front lines after the gentlemen prove themselves well-coiffed flops.
Cooper pursues the villainous arms dealer Rayna Boyanov, who Rose Byrne somehow imbues with dignity even while wearing an outfit accurately described as one made for a “slutty dolphin trainer,” as she attempts to fence the nuke through a greasy playboy (Bobby Cannavale, wearing an obscenity of a double-breasted suit).
The most regrettable thing about the film is that Cooper is never able to employ her pitch perfect first-pet-and-street-you-grew-up-on spy name: Meatball Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. She goes undercover armed with a rape whistle and a “Beaches” watch looking, she says, “like someone’s homophobic aunt.” It’s a great pleasure to watch McCarthy slip from the prim language of her Mary Kay salesperson cover story into her signature salty rants.
And yet she’s also successful thanks to her fighting prowess and awesome spatial intelligence. Her hand-to-hand combat sequence in a small kitchen is enough to make Jackie Chan eat his heart out. Overall, “Spy” is an encouraging film for those of us who’d like to get out from behind our desks and into the world.
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“Spy” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated R. Running time 120 minutes. Visit www.cinemawest.com.
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