What critics had to say about ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’
The reviews (good and bad) of New England native Susanna Fogel's first blockbuster.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” is the latest entry in a genre of films that, until recently, felt nearly nonexistent: the female buddy comedy. Providence native Susanna Fogel’s blockbuster directorial debut blends action set pieces with road trip comic banter as Audrey (Mila Kunis) and her best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) take a harrowing trip through Europe pursued by armed baddies after Audrey’s ex-boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux) turns out to be a CIA spy.
Though the film eventually shows that its female characters are equally adept (or even superior) at spy work compared to their male counterparts, Variety reports that studio executives are aiming for a $10-15 million opening weekend haul at the box office, finishing behind Tom Cruise’s spy flick “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.”
As for critics, reviews have trended slightly more negative than positive, with the film earning a 42 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this article’s publication.
That said, a single number can’t adequately capture the range of critical response, and many of the reviews coded as “fresh” or “rotten” by the critical aggregation site have a bit more nuance. To help you judge whether to rush to theaters starting Thursday afternoon, here’s what some of the top film critics are saying, both good and bad, about “The Spy Who Dumped Me.”
The Good
New York Times critic A.O. Scott appreciated the way the rock-solid friendship between Kunis’s and McKinnon’s characters played against conventions.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” departs from buddy-movie conventions in an important way. Audrey and Morgan aren’t the usual oil-and-water pair of natural antagonists thrown together by circumstance so they can squabble their way to mutual appreciation. Instead, their bond is a constant, an absolute, the one thing in a world of lies and murderous double-crosses that is not subject to doubt.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker praised Kunis’s and McKinnon’s chemistry and credited Fogel’s keen direction.
Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon riff gleefully in the ample and precise framework of Susanna Fogel’s effervescent action comedy. … Though the story goes a country too far and gets lost in its dénouement, the movie is, for the most part, a playful and giddy delight.
While Robert Abele of The Wrap found “The Spy Who Dumped Me” hit-or-miss, he said that audiences need to see more movies like it.
The world as it exists definitely needs more movies with engaging women like Kunis and McKinnon showing the boys a thing or two about pals-in-peril laughs and thrills.
The So-So
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune was one of several critics who thought McKinnon was the best part of the movie.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” gets by, barely, thanks mainly to Kate McKinnon. … Co-writer/director Susanna Fogel’s action comedy about best friends caught up in international espionage is stupidly, relentlessly violent. This makes it hard for the audience to relax and enjoy. Yet McKinnon’s apparent improvisations and inventions create a second, better movie in the margins.
Writing for Rogerebert.com, Christy Lemire also had a problem with the film’s excessive violence.
The comedy isn’t (entirely) the problem in “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” which, as a title, is cleverer than the movie itself. It’s the extreme violence, which serves as a jarring contrast to the goofy antics. The killings are actually more over the top than the ones you might see in a straight-up spy movie, which I guess is the point.
In his two-star review, The Boston Globe‘s Ty Burr said that the film’s strengths lie less in scenes concerned with the plot and more in sequences with Kunis and McKinnon riffing on female friendship, calling the film “an easy, awfully disposable two hours.”
Best is when the movie lets Kunis and McKinnon, who click together nicely, riff on the eternal verities of female friendship – the in-jokes, the petty rivalries, the mutual support system. … “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is at its worst tending to plot (a thumb drive? really?) and at its strongest when following its odder impulses. (A severed thumb in a lipstick dispenser. Really.)
The Ugly
Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Nashawaty savaged the film, calling it “a mirthless, dead-on-arrival dud,” and criticized both McKinnon’s performance as over-the-top and Fogel and co-writer David Iserson’s screenplay as unfunny.
It’s a sign of just how unfunny and undercooked director Susanna Fogel and co-writer David Iserson’s limp screenplay is that McKinnon’s Morgan’s last name is Freeman — and can’t milk one decent gag out of it.
For The Washington Post, Sonia Rao cleverly referred to the film as “the cinematic equivalent of The Cheesecake Factory,” which she did not mean favorably.
To understand the experience of watching “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” it is first necessary to understand the Cheesecake Factory. Allow me to explain: You enter the restaurant with a few dishes in mind, only to have so many offered to you that the spiral-bound menu requires page numbers. The hodgepodge decor turns the ugly dial all the way to 11. You will leave feeling overstuffed (and probably a little regretful).
In her review for Slate, Inkoo Kang criticized Fogel for making numerous wrong decisions when translating her script to the screen, and relying on an overabundance of tropes.
Partly to blame is the choice to go down the R-rated studio-comedy checklist and fulfill every item. An uncanny resemblance to a much better comedy from a few years ago? Check. A pushing-30 existential crisis? Check. Pointless diarrhea? Check. A brief and gratuitous shot of dong? Check. Grisly yet tedious violence? A shockingly casual attitude toward murder? Paeans to friendship as hollow as lunar craters? Check, check, and check. It doesn’t help that Kunis and McKinnon share zero chemistry, thus sucking the air out of each scene in which they’re supposed to be bonding.
