After trickling into the mainstream since the beginning of cinema, parodies exploded in popularity during the 1970s with postmodern films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Blazing Saddles (1974) poking fun at their respective genres. The goofiness expanded into the ‘80s when Leslie Nielsen took over the scene in films like Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). The genre continued evolving and growing in popularity, reaching a peak ‒ or rather a valley ‒ in the early 2000s, when Scary Movie, Meet the Spartans and a slew of others were the new fad. These showcased arguably the lowest form of humor ‒ Leo-pointing-meme moments where the reference being made is the entire joke. But after this nadir, (and before they took on their current form of brand-biopic satires), parodies reached a softer point, blending more seamlessly into their respective genres.
This is where 2015’s Spy comes in. It’s a whole lot smarter than the low point of the early 2000s, and at various moments, it takes us back to the earlier Nielsen days, subverting expectations through rapid-fire jokes and gags with ingenuous irony. However, over its two-hour runtime, Spy devolves from its creative humor and funny gags into mean-spirited ridicule and forced word-salads. Its highly positive critical reception doesn’t quite feel deserved, as director Paul Feig fails to keep up the charm and instead uses lead Melissa McCarthy as a punching bag of insults directed at the girl who doesn’t belong.
Spy hilariously begins mid-mission with the charmingly bumbling yet unflappable CIA agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law) on a secret mission to track down a missing nuclear bomb before it falls into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, Susan Cooper (McCarthy) is the brain behind the man, leading him on his missions via radio transmission from her desk at CIA headquarters. The story kicks off when Fine is seemingly killed in action, leaving the bomb on the loose. Meanwhile, fears arise about a mole in the agency, leaving Director of the CIA Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney) without a clean field agent. Cooper volunteers as the unlikely but surprisingly capable agent, who will surely be unrecognizable in the field given her everywoman appearance. By tackling this mission, she aims to prove to herself and her colleagues that looks can be deceiving, as she teams up with other unlikely heroes to save the day.
The film has a stacked cast, featuring Rose Byrne as the evil mistress and Jason Statham as a flailing field agent alongside Janney, Law and McCarthy. Known for acclaimed television hits like Freaks and Geeks and The Office, frequent McCarthy collaborator Paul Feig wrote and directed the film, which served as a follow-up to 2011’s Bridesmaids (McCarthy’s breakthrough feature role) and subsequent buddy cop comedy The Heat (2013) . Spy possesses all the ingredients of a hilarious smash hit ‒ and in fairness, there are a lot of funny gags and jokes and several laugh-out-loud moments.
Considering the strong start and the potential of the cast and crew, it’s frustrating to watch the film devolve into mean-spirited insult-hurling, often at Cooper’s expense. It feels like Feig was conditioned from the success of Bridesmaids, in which several notable moments were centered around McCarthy’s crude or embarrassing jokes. Most seemed to poke fun at the character who didn’t physically belong in the group. Ironically, it feels like Feig is the bully who learned to get attention by picking on others, as he similarly uses McCarthy as the punching bag in Spy to garner laughs. At a certain point, the audience feels jaded and wonders how many more times they can hear Cooper mocked for her un-agent-like appearance. The script flips in the third act when, rather than McCarthy’s character acting as a pathetic fish out of water, she becomes crass herself. Both feel mean, but the latter just turns into a challenge of how many creative insults can be hurled. It’s emblematic of mid-2010s humor when concatenating random bits of profanity into unexpected permutations was the peak form of comedy. This is especially true of the scenes between McCarthy and Statham, which feel like they were made in order to create a blooper reel that can be played after the credits roll.
Ultimately, Spy is overrated because it failed to live up to its potential. The film shines when it focuses on satirizing spy movies with hilarious gags like the “bomb” whipped up out of homemade materials, the bad guy falling onto a spike or the head-fake of being saved by the forgotten ally. Feig is clever enough to pick up on so many spy tropes and lampoon them in hilarious ways, but he can’t help but fall into veiled bullying and crude word salads instead of taking a page out of the more fun and funnier parody films that came before and actually finding something worthy of skewering. Sure, there’s a heartfelt message buried in there about judging a book by its cover, but it’s negated and overshadowed by all of the bullying that precedes it.
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