«L'espion qui m'a larguée» (The spy who dumped me), or De l'improbabilité (The improbability)

Two thirty-something long-time friends, Audrey (Mila Kunis) and Morgan (Kate McKinnon), find themselves by a combination of circumstances in the middle of a case involving espionage, USB sticks and terrorism. That's the film in a nutshell The spy who dumped me by director Susanna Fogel. Does this sound vague? In many ways, the film is. But that's not the worst of it.

Most of the time, viewers of these Hollywood action comedies want to have a good time. They want to laugh, to be startled, to be drawn in and, why not, to be moved. All it takes is a good dose of humor, rhythm and good feelings, and it's ready to go. This is what we were expecting, not without impatience, after viewing the promising - but misleading! - trailer for The spy who dumped me.

There are films, such as the famous Johnny English (2003) with the incomparable Rowan Atkinson, who manage to blend the James Bond-style spy movie with zany, absurd characters and comic situations, while still touching us. In this kind of highly successful feature film, the «bad guys» are never so bad, and there's no explicit violence. The viewer is drawn into a parallel universe with its own codes, which he or she gladly accepts thanks to the humor.

The spy who dumped me is a kind of Johnny English a failure: the protagonists are certainly not the most intelligent, but the film is far too violent for us to be comfortable with the comedy. This hybrid film seems to favor action scenes: car chases, shoot-outs and so on. However, as a purely action film, it fails because of details unlikely in a «serious» production, and as a comedy, it's far too violent and doesn't focus enough on quality humor.

Everything in this film seems improbable, starting with the young women's feelings and reactions, which are totally unreal and superficial. The fact that Audrey doesn't react to the death of her partner, for example, doesn't make her a «strong woman» - which the director and co-writer probably wanted to emphasize - but rather an idiot with absurd behavior. Moreover, the false feminist commitment behind this film is distressing. In addition to the «revolutionary» aspect of portraying two heroines on screen, one of them is a clumsy and ignorant defender of women's rights. This was unnecessary.

It's also highly unlikely that two police cars would turn up within ten seconds of an accident in such a large city as Vienna. By the way, The spy who dumped me respects the tradition of the spy movie with an international (or rather, European) twist: the two impromptu spy friends travel between Prague, Berlin, Paris, Budapest and other major European cities. But here too, Hollywood's ignorance of our continent is astounding. Apart from the classic clichés of alternative Berliners and underground and elegant Englishmen, the film is a series of grotesque inaccuracies. Unless, of course, you can enjoy a cheese fondue in a chic Vienna café at eleven in the morning.

Mila Kunis is, as usual, sympathetic in her role as a pampered thirty-something, but that's not enough to save the day. The improbability of the film comes to a head when we realize that these ultra-trained spies don't pull any punches, and don't hesitate to destroy a series of public places in the middle of the day, with shoot-outs and the mass destruction of bars in the middle of town, from which tourists magically disappear to be replaced by hordes of spies. When a fortiori you see the way the film's ending is cut short, you think it was you who should have dumped the spy.

Write to the author: virginia.eufemi@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Impuls Pictures

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