The Spy Who Dumped Me (Imagine Entertainment, BRON Studio, Lionsgate, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie that turned out to be an unexpected delight: The Spy Who Dumped Me, a spoof of both James Bond movies and Valley Girl stories I got as a package on amazon.com along with The Boy Next Door (the sort of theatrical feature that so closely follows the Lifetime formula that Lifetime has actually shown it; it’s pretty standard Lifetime fare distinguished only by having a star even non-LIfetime watchers have heard of: Jennifer Lopez) and The Hitman’s Bodyguard (which did well enough to generate a sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard). I was hoping that screening something this light would be an antidote not only for the depressing news shows but also the heavy-duty 1950’s French art films we’d been watching lately, Lola Montès and Paris Belongs to Us. I got that but also quite a bit more than I bargained for: a comedy-thriller whose director and co-writer (with David Iserson), Susanna Fogel, managed to balance the comedy and the thrills superbly. It starts with Our Heroine, dark-haired Audrey (Mila Kunis) and her blonde-ditz best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) – who later confesses that her last name is “Freeman,” which helps her get restaurant reservations (though what the reservation clerks think when a young white woman shows up instead of the older Black man they were expecting is something to ponder) at a bar for Audrey’s birthday. She has just received a text message from her boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), breaking up with her.

The film flashes back to Audrey’s and Drew’s original meeting exactly one year before, at the same bar, when she and Morgan were also out celebrating her birthday and they met over a bad joke about her wearing a “Happy Birthday” headdress even though it isn’t her birthday (though since the two scenes take place exactly a year apart it’s obvious we’re supposed to think it is her birthday). They had a typical modern relationship that included a dinner date with his parents at the Incredible Cheesecake Factory before he disappeared on her and sent her the breakup text. The film cuts away to what Drew is really doing at the moment Audrey is frantically trying to text him back to plead with him to stay: he’s in the middle of a frantic James Bond-style action sequence involving goon squads out to kill him, hair’s-breadth escapes and, in one scene, Drew surviving the collapse of an apartment-building balcony as the entire building it was attached to blows up. The cover identity Drew had given Audrey is that he was employed by National Public Radio doing a podcast on economics and jazz (which sounds like something I’d probably want to listen to!), but she soon learns that he was really a spy when two espionage agents, Sebastian (Sam Haughan, whom quite frankly I found a lot hotter than Justin Theroux) and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj), kidnap her and hold her hostage in a van.

The MacGuffin they’re after is a flash drive concealed in a plastic trophy Drew won for finishing second in a fantasy football league; a pissed-off Audrey had burned all Drew’s other belongings but hasn’t yet got around to that one. Sebastian and Duffer instruct her to go to Vienna – the one in Austria – and go to the Café Sheila to deliver the trophy to someone named Verne. Of course when I heard they were going to do the drop in a Vienna café I joked, “Will there be a zither player there?” There wasn’t, though there was a nice joke when Morgan reads the tourist guide book and says, “They make a lot about Mozart being from here, but they don’t mention Hitler.” (Actually both Mozart and Hitler were native Austrians, but neither was from Vienna: Mozart was from Salzburg and Hitler from Linz.) Throughout the movie Our Heroines end up surrounded by assassins, either from the CIA, the British equivalent MI-6 (people often get confused between MI-5 and MI-6; MI-6 is the British intelligence agency, their equivalent of the CIA, while MI-5 is their counter-intelligence agency, fulfilling the function of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division in the U.S.) or an international terrorist organization whose whole agenda of future attacks is supposedly contained on that flash drive.

The bartender at the bar where Audrey and Morgan had their birthday celebration, who introduced himself as Ukrainian (which led Morgan to ask him if the correct name of the country is “Ukraine” or “The Ukraine”) and whom Morgan brought home because he had a huge cock, turns out to be a hit man aimed at killing her and Audrey (as well as Drew if he’d been there) to recover the football trophy containing the flash drive. “Verne” at the Café Sheila in Vienna turns out to be a woman – an attendant at the women’s restroom – and this revelation kicks off the film’s strongest action sequence, as Our Heroines attempt to car-jack an elderly couple (then find they can’t drive their car because it has a stick shift) and then steal a taxi while one of the hit people after them clings to its roof and Audrey and Morgan have to remember how to get the car to swerve and knock him off again. The film gets a bit slower as it moves around Europe to places like Paris, France and Berlin, Germany (Charles and I have often joked about how modern audiences are so geographically challenged they have to have explained to them just what countries those cities are in – though we’ve also joked about U.S. towns like Peru, Indiana and Cairo, Illinois that have appropriated foreign place names but pronounce them differently: “PEE-roo” and “KAY-row,” respectively).

Doing for comedy what all too many thriller-movie writers (notably Tony Gilroy) do seriously, Fogel and Iserson (who in addition to co-writing this movie also appears in it, briefly, as a bar patron in the opening scene) fill the second half of this movie with reversals on top of reversals, leaving both Our Heroines and us somewhat at sea as to who is on whose side and what the significance of that mysterious flash drive really is. They also create some truly inspired characters, including Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), a former Eastern Bloc gymnast who after only winning silver at the Olympics was drafted into being a hit person – and one of the dorkier but also most entertaining scenes is one in which she and Morgan end up on trapezes in the middle of a Cirque du Soleil-style act at the Berlin Museum of Technology’s big reception and, in what might have been intended as a parody of the fight scene in Robert Taylor’s medieval period piece Quentin Durward (1955), in which the hero and the villain had to fight to the death with one hand each because they were both suspended on ropes and needed their other hands to hang on, Morgan and the gymnast-hit woman have to fight on trapezes while desperately gripping them to keep from falling. Of course, the audience in the hall thinks this is all part of the act, and loves it (a gimmick Charlie Chaplin pulled in his 1928 film The Circus, in which he gets a job as a clown but the joke is he can only make audiences laugh when he’s not trying to).

The film ends in a bizarre Mexican standoff in which Drew – who was supposedly killed early on in the action but turns up alive at the end (another all-too-common thriller cliché Fogel and Iserson both exploit and make fun of) – and Sebastian each try to convince Audrey that they’re the good guy and the other is the terrorist, and the ending is a nice capstone to an unexpectedly entertaining and genuinely funny film. The Spy Who Dumped Me has a few of the body-function gags that have rendered so many modern “comedies” not only unfunny but unwatchable – like the sequence in which Audrey tells Sebastian she’s hidden the flash drive in her vagina and, while she’s riding in his car, she has to reach down between her legs to retrieve it; and the later scene in which Morgan says she’s swallowed it (and that means they’ll have to wait until she excretes to recover it), but for the most part The Spy Who Dumped Me is a very funny film; as the late William Youngren once said about Zubin Mehta’s recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Act I, The Spy Who Dumped Me is, “if not a great [film] to treasure, at least an extremely fine one for simple enjoyment.”