Here’s the fun things about spoofs: they can embrace cliches. If a “serious” movie tries to be too much like something else, then it’s considered derivative. But a spoof has license to do exactly that — that’s the actual point.
Such is the case with the reductively named Spy. This is a Melissa McCarthy send up that puts her in Europe working as a CIA agent to… you know what… It doesn’t matter. The plot has something to do with a nuclear bomb, but who cares? The movie is basically a vehicle for McCarthy to be funny, and it absolutely succeeds at that, even if it falls short at pure storytelling.
Enjoying this will necessarily depend on how funny you find McCarthy (I personally find her hilarious), but there are supporting characters that contribute just as much. Rose Byrne is a self-absorbed femme fatale who steals every scene she’s in, and Jason Statham does a pitch-perfect parody of, well, himself, as a fellow agent who claims to have undergone some of the most inventive ordeals.
He’s worth quoting at length (read this as Statham yelling across a conference room; I know you can hear it…):
Nothing kills me. I'm immune to 179 different types of poison. I know because I ingested them all at once when I was deep undercover in an underground poison-ingesting crime ring… I once used defibrillators on myself. I put shards of glass in my fuckin' eye. I've jumped from a high-rise building using only a raincoat as a parachute and broke both legs upon landing; I still had to pretend I was in a fucking Cirque du Soleil show! I've swallowed enough microchips and shit them back out again to make a computer… During the threat of an assassination attempt, I appeared convincingly in front of congress as Barack Obama… I watched the woman I love get tossed from a plane and hit by another plane mid-air. I drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while it was on fire. Not the car, I was on fire.
This is not a sophisticated movie, but the humor isn’t entirely juvenile either. It walks the line pretty well.
There are some fun gags like the increasingly dowdy cover identities and names McCarthy’s character is given (cat lady Carol Jenkins; “I look like someone's homophobic aunt”), and a fantastic scene with Michael McDonald as a deadpan “Q”-type gadgeteer who issues McCarthy a series of gadgets under increasingly embarrassing guises (hemorrhoid pads spiked with chloroform and a poison antidote in a bottle labeled as a stool softener).
I watched this film on a flight to Frankfurt, and I’ll admit to laughing out loud a couple of times to the point where I became self-conscious that people were staring at me.