THE REEL: The Spy Who Dumped Me

Women are increasingly becoming the leads in action movies right now. And it’s not only the reserve of regular action actresses like back-in-the-day.

Mila Kunis plays Audrey Stockton, a cashier, in The Spy Who Dumped Me. It’s her birthday but she doesn’t feel like celebrating it because her boyfriend dumped her -- on text.

Her best friend and roommate, Morgan (Kate McKinnon), convinces her to burn stuff her ex-boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), had left at their house.

She texts to tell him that she is going to do it, but as they are in the process of burning his items he calls her and says he will go over to see her the next morning.

SECRET AGENT

When Drew shows up, he tells her that the reason he had been very shady and secretive, then had to break up with her, is because he’s a CIA agent and he would have put her life in danger.

However, there are guys who are after Drew and they want to extract a package from him. They have followed Drew to the house Audrey and Morgan share, and now the two are caught up in the chase.

The girls have to go from Los Angeles in the US to Vienna in Austria, to get the package into the right hands and get protection.

This movie is an explosive story throughout, and even its beginning is up-tempo with a fight that is dirty in terms of the tactics that the combatants employ.

I have been sceptic of a lot of “action” movies led by female comedians. This action-comedy, though, is very raw and almost pure action film. The fight scenes are well-choreographed, even the ones in which Kunis and McKinnon feature in.

Their reactions are also real, in the context of the time the action is happening, unlike other movies that try to exaggerate reactions to incorporate comedy in them.

And it also has surprisingly bloody and sometimes gory scenes that show that director Susanna Fogel and her co-writer David Iserson took the challenge seriously.

Though he was in a supporting role, Sam Heughan’s role as Sebastian was the best performance for me.

FORCED COMEDY

However, I found the comedy side of it being a bit forced on the audience a lot of times. I think directors assumed that anything said in a loud voice by an actor or actress that is a comedian has to be funny. Wrong.

There was a lot of shouting in the movie by Audrey and Morgan that it sometimes became very annoying. Some of the other comedy scenes also had a lot of exaggerated reactions to normal, and maybe not so normal, occurrences.

It’s good to want to shout out and talk about “girl power” but when you do that in a movie to the extent that it becomes a “tell” and not so much of a “show” then I think that’s where the plot was literally lost.

Hasan Minhaj’s character, Duffer, didn’t sit right with me, though I cannot put a finger on what about him came as off or underdeveloped.

Maybe it was how the character was supposed to be a frat guy, yet he didn’t look or act the part that well…

I enjoyed the movie; even though I was sleepy when I began watching it around 12.15am on a Monday morning, I stayed up to find out how it would end.

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