Blu-ray Review: The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

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For Audrey (Mila Kunis), the only thing worse than getting dumped by text message right before her thirtieth birthday – which also happens to be her one year anniversary – is only hearing from her ex-boyfriend after her best friend threatens to burn his stuff, and discovering that the one thing he seems to care the most about is his fantasy football trophy.

Of course, little does Audrey realize that the trophy isn't really the end result of her ex Drew (Justin Theroux) trading names with friends on the computer but is of actual global importance if, that is, she manages to get it to the right people in a cafe in Vienna.

Told this by Drew in the middle of a gunfight which breaks out early on in Susanna Fogel's The Spy Who Dumped Me, Kunis's stunned Audrey serves as the stand-in for the audience. Although as we watch her process what – without the backdrop of a fast-paced shootout – would otherwise have been a pretty blunt expository "info dump," we realize we might be a few steps ahead of her.

Given a cover job as a hybrid jazz and economics themed podcaster that's just boring enough that Trader Joe's cashier Audrey wouldn't have given it a second thought, the imperiled spy who dumped our straight-laced lead manages to persuade her to take the film's Hitchcockian MacGuffin trophy and run... along with her uninhibited, oversharing best friend Morgan (played by Kate McKinnon).

While obviously there's nothing quite like carnage in your own kitchen to convince you to flee, in Audrey's case, Morgan's question, "Do you want to die having never been to Europe?" serves as the ultimate selling point.

Unfortunately for Audrey and Morgan but enjoyably for us, more near-death experiences await them in Europe as Spy morphs into a much better action movie than a comedy, thanks to some inventively choreographed sequences boasting the same stunt coordinator behind Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible in the form of Gary Powell.

Admirably keeping up with the action (at least for a little while), McKinnon tosses off the quick-witted one-liners written in Fogel and David Iserson's script as well as she improvises her own and shines alongside the affable Kunis in these moments of fast-paced situational comedy. And this is best epitomized in a scene where – following an outrageous shootout in Vienna – backseat driver Morgan asks Audrey why she's using a turn signal in the middle of a car chase since she's literally telling the people after them where they're going.

At her strongest when given clear direction and fully focused on the events at hand, while McKinnon's flighty friend provides Spy with some moments of levity throughout, far too often the gifted comedian distracts viewers rather than makes us laugh by spinning off into ridiculous tangents.

Perhaps enjoying the performance in the moment as opposed to worrying about how it would all flow together onscreen, although it's clear that Fogel has a soft spot for Morgan (as we do too because it is, after all, McKinnon), from the end of the first act, Morgan begins to get in the way of the plot.

Further straying from course, rather than serve up a cool, classy female-centric comedic spin on a globe hopping spy tale, The Spy Who Dumped Me's overreliance on unnecessary scatological humor to appeal to the lowest common denominator needlessly bogs it down from time to time.

Yet, wise enough to put the friendship of these lovely ladies first, from the bullets flying overhead to the ex-boyfriends who cross their path, Fogel doesn't let the women get sidetracked by anything for long, which includes costars Sam Heughan, Hasan Minhaj, Gillian Anderson, Jane Curtin, and Paul Reiser.

While not nearly as effective as James Mangold's woefully underrated Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz or Paul Feig's sequel worthy Spy with Melissa McCarthy, it's still refreshing to see two female outsiders work together in an action movie rather than turn into rivals or be relegated to date bait.

Though eager to see the filmmaker helm more solid action movies in the future, for Spy's sake, I wish Fogel and company could've spent as much time choreographing moments of genuine, well earned laughter as they did executing the perfect stunt.

Ideal at home or as escapist airplane entertainment when you just want something mindless to watch to pass the time, while my current favorite Saturday Night Live star amuses less than she annoys, she helps buoy her costar all the same. And as such, Fogel's film offers further proof that – especially when employed as a relatable comedic foil to a wackier sidekick – Kunis is an ensemble comedy MVP who viewers will follow like a turn signal in a car chase.

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Dedication

Director: Justin Theroux

“Success in this business is 99% perseverance and 1% talent,” children’s book publisher Arthur Planck (Bob Balaban) tells three in-house illustrators before dismissing two of them to give the sole female, Lucy Reilly (Mandy Moore) her big break. By this point, it’s evident to the audience that the question isn’t whether or not Lucy is talented and she undeniably is but whether or not she can persevere to work with the publisher’s most unspeakably cruel, judgmental, depressing and misogynistic yet successful authors, Henry Roth (Billy Crudup) after his longtime collaborator Rudy Holt (Tom Wilkinson) dies.

With a constant unease about his existence and a preference to lay on the floor with heavy objects (usually books) atop his body to keep him feeling safe and secure, Henry is a walking time-bomb who, despite producing the wildly popular Marty the Beaver children’s book and being prompted for a sequel, spends most of his time alienating everyone he meets as punishment for his misery and “crap childhood” as well as imagining he’s speaking to Rudy throughout the film even while in the presence of Lucy. Eager to rip his new partner to shreds, he takes Lucy to a diner for a meeting and like most writers, proceeds to inventively create stories about those with whom he comes into contact yet each story is filled with such contempt and horror that Lucy soon flees, only to return with the promise of a two hundred thousand dollar bonus from the publisher to get the book finished, when she’s strapped for cash and nearly kicked out of her apartment by her controlling landlady, Carol (Dianne Wiest) who happens to be her mom.

Hardly the stuff of an “uplifting romantic comedy” as the back of the film’s box promises and while there’s not much going for the film to keep us invested for the first half, the actors (especially Crudup who by this point has made a career of playing neurotic jerks) keep us watching. In addition, there are enough surprises wherein the film fails to go down routes of predictability as when Henry, who beginning to have feelings for Lucy, has the means to crush her former flame seeking a second chance and doesn’t, to make us forgive some of its overly aware eccentricities the filmmakers hoped were quirky but in all reality were just plain annoying.

Making his directorial debut from a first time script by David Bromberg, actor Justin Theroux (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Mulholland Drive) is best when giving his fellow character actors such as Crudup and Wilkinson a chance to shine and misguided when he tries too hard to make some moments overly romantic such as a cringe-worthy confrontation where Crudup pleads for Moore to take him back with more than enough bizarre profanity and crazy stream-of-consciousness dialogue to have anyone (let alone a possible mate) head for the hills. Still, particularly admirable in giving Moore another opportunity to break out of the twenty-something romantic girl movie pack in offering her character a story arc of her own. In Moore's hands, the thoughtful and intelligent Lucy becomes more than simply a one-dimensional cliché of the rescuing, selfless angel out to melt a cold man’s heart who masochistically casts hers aside in the process. However, similar to Lucy's character, overall, the bottom line of Dedication's success will be up to the viewers to decide whether or not they'd like to persevere in the company of Crudup's Holt for the film's entire running time.

The Ten

Director:
David Wain

Although it’s comprised of ten vignettes that use the biblical Ten Commandments as a jumping-off point, those who are overly devout or easily offended may want to skip director David Wain’s irreverent, unbalanced, yet undeniably hilarious The Ten. Hosted by Paul Rudd whose character finds himself breaking one of the commandments himself by being torn between his beautiful, loyal wife Famke Janssen or the young, sexy film buff Jessica Alba, the offbeat comedy The Ten which begins with a cautionary tale of a young man (Adam Brody) who jumps out of a plane without a parachute, only to find himself stuck in the ground where he’s worshipped as a false God but still finds time to party and star in his own television show, gets progressively more outrageous with each successive story.

Featuring a relative who’s who of comedians and actors, we soon encounter Gretchen Mol as a buttoned up thirty-something virgin librarian who has a summer fling while vacationing in Mexico with a carpenter named Jesus, a surgeon who leaves a pair or scissors inside a patient as “a goof,” Oliver Platt as an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator who becomes a surrogate father to teen black twins, Liev Schreiber as a jealous father who tries to out buy his neighbor in the cat scan machine market, a man who covets a prison wife and of course, Winona Ryder who steals a ventriloquist’s dummy with whom she falls in love while on her honeymoon. Also featuring Justin Theroux, Bobby Cannavale, and others, despite its uneven nature as some of the more ridiculous plots and characters do detract from the overall success, The Ten is compulsively watchable and sure to interest devotees of sketch comedy.