By Preston Wilder
Here’s a gender-balanced double bill at the multiplex this weekend: watch Entourage, the big-screen version of the show about four horny guys in Hollywood, then wash down the sour-mash aroma of unreconstructed male with Spy, in which mousy desk-jockey Melissa McCarthy discovers her inner action hero. The infamous ‘Bechdel test’ calls for movies to have at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man – and Spy passes the test because its female characters talk about things like selling a nuclear bomb to the highest bidder, or sometimes don’t talk at all and just try to murder each other with guns and knives. It’s all quite empowering.
It’s also quite funny, though perhaps not as funny as it could be. One small annoyance is writer-director Paul Feig’s penchant for ugly, gratuitous detail designed to earn his film an ‘R’ rating, often viewed as a selling-point for a comedy (ratings in the US work differently so you don’t actually lose customers with an ‘R’ rating, they just have to be accompanied by an adult). Spy is peppered with startlingly lurid moments: a man’s throat dissolves, another is impaled on a spike, there’s vomit and swearing and glimpses of a tumescent penis. None of it feels essential to what’s really just a breezy Bond parody; the ugly details are more like the rat droppings that fall on a chocolate cake in an early scene – and then someone eats it, another ugly detail.
The cake has been baked, minus rat droppings, by Melissa – because that’s what she does, bakes cakes and hides in the background. Her mother drummed it into her when she was a child (it’s a truism in today’s culture that any gender inequality must be due to conditioning), teaching her mottos like “Just blend in, let somebody else win” and “Give up on your dreams” (“She put that one in my lunchbox,” recalls our heroine) – so now she works at a CIA desk job, acting as long-distance enabler and all-round cheerleader for field agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law). “Oh Bradley you’re so Fine / You’re so Fine, you blow my mind,” sings the poor lovestruck fool, suppressing her own secret-agent chops.
It’s another of the film’s small annoyances that Melissa becomes a better woman by becoming more like a man, knocking out goons like a distaff Jason Statham. The real Mr. Statham, meanwhile, sends up his macho persona and gets some of Spy’s biggest laughs – though his character treads water after a hilarious speech where he lists all the feats of derring-do that have made him such a hard man (they include having his left arm ripped off and re-attaching it with his right arm, watching the woman he loved thrown off a plane then hit by another plane in mid-air, plus “taking up the piano at an advanced age”). Feig tends to hit the same note over and over, repeating himself not just with Statham but the one-liners in general. Too many lines are variations on a colourful insult, characters described as looking like “a slutty dolphin trainer”, “a flute player in a wedding band” or an “asthmatic Big Bird”.
It’s yet another of the film’s small annoyances that it over-milks its jokes (the bane of Hollywood comedy in the past few years), 120 minutes being much too long for this material. There’s a limit to how many times we can smile at McCarthy forced to field crushing blows to her self-esteem, whether it’s Law presenting her with a cupcake necklace because she likes cake – “Imagine how awkward it’d be if it was a diamond ring,” she fake-laughs – or imperious bitch Rose Byrne telling her she eats like a baby (the many scatological jokes, meanwhile, play on the assumption that a fat woman’s bodily functions are the grossest thing ever). Then again, Byrne makes an excellent mean girl – she and McCarthy were also in the Feig-directed Bridesmaids – and it’s certainly unusual to watch an action comedy where women call the shots, both as heroine and villainess.
Maybe that explains the good reviews Spy’s been getting – though the film is lively, with some sharp throwaway lines. Melissa, after being accosted by an over-amorous Italian: “Was Pepe Le Pew not available?”. Melissa, after trying and failing to ride a scooter into a car-chase: “Who puts a roof on a scooter? What are you, the Pope?”. I even liked rapper 50 Cent (as himself) warming up a Hungarian audience with “Hello Budapest! I had some goulash, that shit’s on point!”. But Spy will be remembered (if at all) for its girl-on-girl fight scene, estrogen-laced heroics and general air of gender parity, something of a warm-up for Feig’s upcoming all-female Ghostbusters. “I was having such an empowering moment,” sighs our heroine, speaking for the film as a whole. Then she saw Entourage.
DIRECTED BY Paul Feig
STARRING Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Rose Byrne
US 2015 120 mins
