As a comic actress, Melissa McCarthy resembles a first-rate baseball pitcher—because, unlike many of her brethren, who have a singular shtick and stick with it, she has both a curve and a fastball.
McCarthy, the unquestioned breakout comedy star of the past few years, does wonders with parts in which she is called upon to be a mild, slightly introverted, lovable fat girl afflicted with low self-esteem and a wit she finds it necessary to suppress so that people won’t get mad at her. And she is equally, if not more, wonderful as a loud, blowsy, motor-mouthed insult artist who never heard of low self-esteem, and if she had, would go on an extended profane attack on its very existence.
The writer-director Paul Feig made the inspired decision to sculpt a character for McCarthy in his script for the new movie Spy that allows her to use her curve and her fastball in the same performance. She is Susan, a CIA agent who works at Langley as the eyes and ears for a glamorous Bondian hotshot played by Jude Law.
He is able to take out six Bulgarian enemy agents without batting an eye or breaking a sweat only because Susan is watching him from afar and can tell him he’s got a guy coming up on his left or a knife coming at him from his right. Susan did well in her training—there’s footage of her beating the stuffing out of simulated people—but she never put herself forward for field work because she was effectively seduced out of it by Jude Law, who knows she’s in love with him and uses the fact to keep her working as his aide de camp rather than his work rival.
When Law’s character is killed, and other field agents exposed, Susan finally moves out from behind her desk and goes undercover in Paris. About an hour into the proceedings, just as her cover is going to be blown, she desperately transforms herself into the world’s most confident person. She spends the rest of Spy trading hilariously vicious barbs with the movie’s bad guy—played by the gorgeous Australian actress Rose Byrne, with whom McCarthy appeared in Feig’s 2011 comedy blockbuster Bridesmaids, the breakthrough film for all three of them. (The potential keeper from Spy is a delightfully dithering British actress named Miranda Hart, who makes Low Self-Esteem Melissa look like Pallas Athena.)
I wish I could say that the movie that provides McCarthy with the opportunity to achieve this dual tour de force is all that good, but it really isn’t. They’ve been making Bond parodies for nearly 50 years now, dating back to Casino Royale (1967), so any new one needs to find an original spin on the proceedings. Feig checks off all the obvious boxes—a glamorous lair, a missing nuke, a crook who plays baccarat at a posh casino—and then does very little with them but put them on display. Mostly, he overlays uninspired skit ideas atop his labored plot.
The basement of the CIA where Susan works is vermin-infested, but the people who work there are trained to be so calm they don’t even blink when rats walk across their bodies. Not funny. Susan has to deal with a rogue agent who is constantly bragging about his extreme physical exploits, such as how, after a sword fight, he had to sew his arm back on with his other arm. That’s a little funnier, but the British action star Jason Statham overacts so egregriously that he ruins every punch line.
Still, the movie is all McCarthy, and she’s so good in so many different ways that she makes up for most of its shortcomings. Not all, though. When you look at your watch more than twice during a movie, that’s a sign the movie has lost you. I think I looked six times.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
