Movie review: Spy shakes up sexist tropes to serve dry comic martini

By Katherine Monk

It’s a genre that typically serves its sexism straight up, with a wink and a swizzle stick, so Melissa McCarthy’s entry into the gadget-filled world of super spies is enough to create a stir in the familiar martini shaker of male-dominated action movies from the first giddy swig.

In fact, writer-director Paul Feig takes full advantage of our Y-front expectations in the opening scenes as he introduces us to Bradley Fine (Jude Law), a man spawned from the fumes of a decomposed Ian Fleming. He karate chops and roundhouse-kicks his way through a gauntlet of guards, then faces down a villain who knows the location of a stolen suitcase nuke.

It’s all 007 until he sneezes, and accidentally executes the bad guy before he tells Fine where the bomb is stashed.

Though it’s clear from the opening beat that we’re walking into a comedy, thanks to Feig’s broad strokes of parody and Jude Law’s overly smarmy charm, this is the moment where the genre makes a U-turn in the middle of traffic.

The guy screwed up. And that’s not supposed to happen, especially in super spy movies built on the back, front and side of sexist assumptions about a woman’s “role” and how she’s valued, and “Bond Girl” kind of says it all.

But throw Melissa McCarthy into the mix and suddenly you have a whole new game, without balls. Taking on the role of Susan Cooper, an agent who plays earpiece wingman for Fine, McCarthy tones it all the way down to play the competent woman no one ever notices, the invisible talent that continually goes unsung because she’s more interested in work than working it.

Susan Coopers exist, and McCarthy finds every note on the descending scale of self-esteem to make us empathetic in the first flourish of female pathos as she celebrates Fine’s survival with a dinner out.

She’s all dressed up, thinking it’s a romantic dinner, and promptly eats a hand towel. But the humiliation has only just begun. The night ends with Fine presenting a gift to his number one gal who gets him out of trouble: an angry muffin necklace.

McCarthy wears the hurt with a gentle chuckle, but it’s her ability to play a cuddly brand of pissed-off that makes her such a box-office draw. She not only says the things we want to say, she makes it all funny without being cruel.

Even when Susan Cooper tries to be mean, it reads as funny because McCarthy’s delivery always feels like a half-finished sentence, a zinger stranded on a sandbar of second thought. The awkwardness is important, because when Susan finally gets her chance to head out into the field, it’s her ability to be invisible that makes her an asset – which is, in fact, a lot closer to the truth of espionage.

One of the running gags revolves around her dowdy false identities and a kitten sweatshirt, as well as a trove of gadgets designed as hemorrhoid medication. Susan Cooper may finally be a field agent, but she’s still not given glam status.

It’s a brimming pool of sexual inequality and McCarthy bellyflops into the deep end, bringing a profound sense of humanity to a character that typically disappears into the background.

Because she’s such an atypical lead, everyone around her becomes a comic foil, whether it’s the debonair Fine, the mean-girl villain played by Rose Byrne, or the testicle in a tuxedo played by genre fixture Jason Statham.

Wearing a wig and clothes borrowed from Sean Connery’s cedar closet, Statham lands several comic blows skewering his own tough-guy persona, and in turn, the whole genre that worships silent violence and champagne sex scenes.

In many ways, McCarthy is actually playing the straight man – pointing out the implausible, the incongruous and the endemically sexist realities of the world she’s living in. Feig’s script plays it all as comedy, but in every light-handed gag, there lies a clenched fist of commentary.

The movie dares question how we value people, as well as how Hollywood plays a role in establishing social rank through character stereotype. By making the typically invisible character of Susan Cooper visible, Feig stages a subtle revolution, lobbing Molotovs at the male-dominated world of action movies from behind the rubber chicken barricade of comedy.

@katherinemonk

-30-