Critics reviews

In many ways, Spy feels like the perfect culmination for Feig and McCarthy, fusing together body language and sarcasm in the most male of genres. Here, they've reconfigured the globetrotting spy thriller it into a smart, proactive, and endearing deconstruction of what femininity looks like in the modern world. It's a Bond spoof that's often better than the real thing.

The film makes a point of featuring women in the kind of key roles (sidekick, villain, a steely CIA boss) they rarely get a sniff at. What's most pleasing is to see Spy turning its fish-out-of-water tale into one about self-actualisation. Rather than a Spikes Like Us style trail of bumbling, its theme is female empowerment, competence overcoming lack of confidence. McCarthy's talent for fearless physical comedy, freewheeling improv and motor-mouth rants pulls the film along like a locomotive.

It's quite funny, though perhaps not as funny as it could be. One small annoyance is writer-director Paul Feig's penchant for ugly, gratuitous detail designed to earn his film an ‘R' rating, often viewed as a selling-point for a comedy. Spy is peppered with startlingly lurid moments: a man's throat dissolves, another is impaled on a spike, there's vomit and swearing and glimpses of a tumescent penis. None of it feels essential to what's really just a breezy Bond parody.

If you want to watch Hart briefly dance to a live 50 Cent performance before knocking the alarmed rapper over and lying sprawled on top of him, here's where to do it. It may never happen again. It probably shouldn't. As McCarthy vehicles go, Spy is aggressively mid-range and has too many miles on the clock, but it chugs along entertainingly.

At comedies, I usually keep a tally of the number of times I laugh. I lost track at Paul Feig's Spy. Laughing at this movie became a form of exercise. You don't need crunches when you've got this. Loosely, it's an espionage-movie spoof, but the spoof isn't what makes it special. It's a pretext to throw a party. Feig might be the most generous director in American comedies. I don't know whether he thinks we all can be funny, but he seems to believe that everybody in his movies can be.

In making Susan a role model, Feig gets McCarthy to appear as one, too. The edge that the movie takes off McCarthy's humor finds its substitute in occasionally grotesque comic violence—which is, in turn, moralized by Bradley and Susan's mission. In short, "Spy" is the triumph of intelligence over impulse, marketing over mischief, good feelings over great comedy. McCarthy is still awaiting her optimal place in the spotlight.

I'm a fiend for the arthouse and marginal, but I'm also a multiplex-raised creature, and am reflexively conditioned to hope for the best when the summer season arrives. By those very meager standards, Spy will just about do the job: it has a laugh every five minutes or so, it looks like someone's in control... it has the guts to get violent when only a knife through the hand will advance a fight and get an unexpected laugh via a jolt.

The plot itself is a fairly by-the-numbers undercover caper, but by the time Peter Serafinowicz rocks up as a faintly lecherous Italian lothario, you'll just be glad to be in the company of such an embarrassment of comedic riches. Off the back of Bridesmaids, The Heat and now Spy, Hollywood can scarcely afford not to continue supplying McCarthy with a steady flow of star vehicles.

Feig's espionage comedy hurtles along like a real action film. The tension crackles and the audience cackles as the CIA strives to derail the sale of an ultra-portable, terrorist-ready nuclear device. Spy riffs on the glamour and jeopardy of globetrotting adventures. Filled with chases, showdowns, and improbable escapes, this movie derives its charm from every ingredient being just a little off.

The rare big-budget high-concept action-comedy that doesn't lumber or wheeze,Spy may be the best showcase yet for the comic gifts of star Melissa McCarthy. Its affectionate send-up of the Bond franchise serves as a vehicle for sharp observation of the double standards faced by women in the professional world.

But it's the sustained, full-bodied mania of McCarthy's performance—jokes deriving more from how she comes across than from how she looks—that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags. Beyond Feig's smarter-than-usual modulations of form, there's nothing innovative (or especially topical) to the film's sending up of secret-agency culture.

The overly complicated plot drags down the film, and some of the jokes, like the one about how rodent-ridden Susan's old workplace is, are driven pretty far into the ground. But most of the gags land deftly enough, and Susan's initial klutzy self-consciousness provides plenty of outlets for McCarthy's deft physical comedy.