The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) a (Mildly) Belated Review

Have to say, I wasn’t particularly interested in catching this film. I suppose there was nothing outwardly wrong with the concept: Two rather ditzy American women, Audrey (Mila Kunis) and her best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) become involved in Audrey’s ex-boyfriend’s affairs… completely against their wishes.

See, the boyfriend is -I’ll give you no more than three guesses here- a spy.

Not only that, he hid some kinda McGuffin in Audrey’s place and the girls have to get themselves to Europe to deliver the item while avoiding assassins, other agents, and double-agents.

Again, it certainly could have been a decent film, but I was not terribly impressed by the trailers…

When your film is supposed to be a comedy and you mostly see mayhem and stunts/explosions/shootings, one can’t help but wonder if maybe the humorous elements weren’t all that strong, no?

Regardless, I had a few spare minutes and the wife and I were watching anything in particular and the film was on the DVR, yadda yadda, so we put it on and…

…it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared it would be.

Having said that, I can’t say it was terrific either.

Mila Kunis does well as the semi-depressed Audrey, the woman whose boyfriend, she comes to find, is a spy. He’s dumped her (hence the movie’s cryptic title), and with her 30th birthday, is pretty much falling into a funk. Enter her friend Morgan, who is determined to get her friend out of her sadness.

I usually love Kate McKinnon’s antics. She’s a terrific comedian and often plays these types of “wacky” characters quite well. However, this time around she wasn’t given quite as much good material to work with as I was hoping. While she does have some very funny scenes, my disappointment in how her character was ultimately handled is best described by the movie’s climax, where the writer really strains any adequate justification for her character being on a trapeze (!) in a Cirque Du Solei situation.

I mean, that should have been funny but given the film’s penchant for showing some very brutal -and sometimes quite bloody- deaths, it felt too much to have her quite literally going out on such a limb, regardless of how “wacky” she is.

Having said all that (redux), the film was not that bad.

The plot might have been by the numbers but it moved along nicely and while ultimately Ms. McKinnon may not have been used to her full potential she was used well enough and, along with Ms. Kunis’ “straight (wo)man”, made for an engaging fish out of water team.

Further, Sam Heughan proved interesting in the role of Sebastian, a MI-6 agent who may -or may not- have the girls’ interests at heart.

There’s one more element I really loved about the film and, alas, they showed entirely too little of her: Gillian Anderson (that’s right, Scully from X-Files, among many other things!) was delightful in her three or so scenes as Wendy, the head of MI-6 (or whatever agency is after what the girls have). Gillian Anderson does so much with so little screen time and I truly didn’t think she had it in her to do deadpan comedy like she did!

In sum and after weighing the positives and negatives, I offer a mild recommendation to The Spy Who Dumped Me. Yeah, there are better comedies out there and, yeah, they maybe could have done better with Kate McKinnon, but in the end the film was far from a bust and did have several very funny scenes.

You could do far worse on a slow, rainy day.