The Spy Who Dumped Me Is a Solid Showcase for Kate McKinnons Unique Brand of Chaos
Kate McKinnon is an agent of chaos, and were all a little better off for it. In her new movie, The S..
Kate McKinnon is an agent of chaos, and were all a little better off for it. In her new movie, The Spy Who Dumped Me, she plays a woman who is, as someone in the movie points out—and as weve come to expect—“a little much.”
It isnt just that she teaches a macho Ukrainian stranger the finer points of feminism instead of having sex with him, or that she instantly shares this same guys dick pics with her mom so they can loudly evaluate the guys junk while hes still in the next room. Its all of this, plus that McKinnon special sauce—that ragged, irrepressibly goofy energy, which makes her every scene seem perilously close to flying off the rails. McKinnon is all excess, all the time, and The Spy Who Dumped Me—a solid comedy, overall—gives us another chance to bask in that.
Morgan, McKinnons character, is the best friend and sidekick of Audrey (Mila Kunis), who at the start of the movie was just dumped—via text!—by Drew (Justin Theroux), a guy theyd both thought worked for a jazz podcast at NPR. As it turns out, he was some sort of spy. While Audrey and Morgan are begrudgingly ringing in Audreys 30th birthday and making plans to set fire to Drews things, hes overseas—scaling buildings, getting shot at, and blowing things up. Its meant to be a funny contrast: Audrey at the bar with a plastic arcade gun, shooting at a bunch of pixelated nothing, versus Drew, who despite his significant faults seems to have, like, a life.
The Spy Who Dumped Me is not subtle: itll be no surprise to learn that Audrey and Morgans friendship is the emotional linchpin here, nor that they somehow get mixed up in this spy business, their otherwise plain lives—Audrey, for example, is a checkout girl at the local grocery store—suddenly exploding with arm-breaking hand-to-hand combat and government intrigue. They land themselves in a mess that involves multiple mafias, a pair of good-cop, bad-cop M.I.6 hunks (Sam Heughan and Hasan Minhaj), and a Russian assassin-slash-gymnast-slash-model. Audreys never even been to Europe; suddenly, shes sitting in the lap of an Uber driver whose face just got blown off, taking the wheel as assailants chase them through the streets of Vienna. Even then, the movie adds an extra layer of humor: when the gymnast-assassin is instructed to find “two dumb American women,” she looks through her rifle scope for a target and realizes . . . theyre everywhere.
Many of the beats here are boilerplate action-comedy stuff, enlivened by Kunis and McKinnons peculiar but disarmingly sweet buddy-movie chemistry. What makes The Spy Who Dumped Me stand out, somewhat, is that director Susanna Fogel makes it genuinely funny—which shouldnt be that remarkable for a comedy, but here we are. The movie is a curious mix of “been there, done that” and “oh, I finally see the humor in that”—such as a gag about a severed thumb that goes from recycled joke to inspired when Audrey finds a clever place to store that digit.
Its as if Fogel and her stars pure, simple aim is to remind us that the action in this sort of film should also be amusing, that it should tilt and tumble out of control. The movie sends bodies flying, faces into hot pots of fondue, cars tumbling through the streets—predictable scenes, maybe, but somehow genuine, too. It helps to have stars like these: McKinnon brings a delightful queer vibe to her role, which, for her fans, is a hilarious bit of meta-text. She practically drools over Gillian Anderson, who plays an M.I.6 boss and appears here like a lightning bolt, all chic, blonde, and irreproachably tailored. Even her friendship with Kuniss character seems to toe the line, albeit one-sidedly.
In addition to being a master of nonsense, McKinnon—who brought this same vibe to the 2016 Ghostbusters remake—is a master of subtext. The Spy Who Dumped Me picks up on an essential but under-used part of McKinnons personality, which is that beneath all those flashes of spontaneous energy and out-there ideas is someone who honestly, in quieter moments, comes off as a bit of a bashful nerd.
The movies rhythms arent always quite right—theres a bit of third-act slackness that stands out in a movie thats otherwise pretty good at knowing how long to insist on a joke before it stops being funny. But at its best, The Spy Who Dumped Me has a deceptively sophisticated bounce, and a few great ideas about women and ambition, even as it comes off as just another silly summer comedy. Theres a story here about underestimating women, one thats revealed slowly, smartly, with an eye toward avoiding the obvious. Late in the movie, Morgan asks: “Have you ever felt so alive?” Its a joyful line, but the tinge of sadness in it is what gives the movie meaning.
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