Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon in The Spy Who Dumped Me. Photo courtesy of Atom Tickets.
The Spy Who Dumped Me is just as campy as it sounds. If you’re looking for a movie to help you blow off some steam and just have some stupid fun, this movie is for you. It stars Mila Kunis (a.k.a the girl who got dumped) and Kate McKinnon (SNL) as her best friend as they deal with assassins, MI6 agents, and ex-boyfriends across Europe.
Kunis stars as Audrey, a down-on-her-luck jilted lover when her boyfriend dumps her over text. Surprise! Turns out he was a CIA agent and he needs her to get a very important flash-drive to the right people in Berlin before the bad guys get it. We don’t see much of ex-lover Drew (Justin Theroux), but that’s ok because this movie’s not really about him. It’s about Kunis and McKinnon’s (Morgan) characters as they try to survive, and the best friends that they are (the part where they try to stall being tortured by telling all of each other’s secrets to an assassin is actually my favorite).
McKinnon is a true delight in this movie. She’s always waiting with the punchline, the dirty joke, and they crazy stunt. While I don’t quite buy Kunis’s pathetic vibe (seriously, have any of the people making this movie even seen Mila Kunis? There’s just no way you can brand the girl as a loser), McKinnon is the life of the party. As one of the characters puts it, Morgan is “a little much.” And that’s exactly why we love her. (I’m not kidding, she even does acrobatics in this movie while fighting an assassin. It’s fantastic.)
It’s too bad that they felt the need to bring in Sebastian (Sam Heughan). Sebastian is an MI6 agent who wants the drive. While Audrey and Morgan are trying to decide if they can trust him, some chemistry develops between Sebastian and Audrey. That’s right. They brought him in to be the love interest. Frankly, it’s just a little too predictable. McKinnon and Kunis’s team-up as amateur spies is what’s interesting about the film. But, apparently Hollywood doesn’t know how to make a movie without a romance angle. I thought epic car chases, shootouts, double crosses, and torture at the hands of a former gymnast would be enough, but I guess not.
The other problem with Sebastian is that he screws up the plot. If supposedly-good-guy Sebastian is there from the beginning, it kind of makes the whole race across Europe to make sure the flash drive falls into the right hands thing a waste of time. The fact of the matter is that we can just skip the whole movie by having Audrey give Sebastian the drive from the beginning. That’s a problem. There has to be a point to what Audrey and Morgan are trying to do the whole movie, and if the whole thing could’ve been avoided (about five different times, I might add), then the movie is pretty pointless. Oh it’s a lot of fun, but someone really needed to clean up the narrative.
A warning to anyone who’s thinking about sending their teenagers to see the new Mila Kunis movie: It’s rated R. Sure an R rating could just mean a lot of cursing and dirty jokes (have you seen Deadpool?), but this is a hard R. As in, be prepared to see a close up of a guy’s junk on screen. I don’t really see why it was necessary, but this movie seems to skip right past what’s necessary, and goes for straight for the hardcore gore every time. Seriously, if you don’t want to see gross things like Kunis sawing off a guy’s finger, another guy’s face getting dunked in hot cheese, and all sorts of other gory fun, you might want to stay home. Of course, you can always just cover your eyes at the gross parts, and stick around for the laughs.
Don’t expect The Spy Who Dumped Me to have any sort of quality cinema, intellectualism, or nuance. It’s a stupid, fun film. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you came to the right place.
