Susanna Fogel’s The Spy Who Dumped Me is yet another entry in a long line of Hollywood spy films, sure, but all of its best moments come in the far less frequently represented female friendship at its core. Kunis plays Audrey, a 30-year-old Trader Joe’s employee who has just been dumped via text by Drew (Justin Theroux). She’s heartbroken and embarrassed, but far from broken. She has other people in her life—namely, her supportive, eccentric actress best friend Morgan (McKinnon). When the ex, who turns out to be a spy, entrusts Audrey with a MacGuffin in the form of a second place Fantasy Football trophy, and tells her she needs to get it to Vienna, Audrey sets off on a whirlwind tour of the European continent with Morgan by her side, complete with assassination attempts, torture scenarios, and severed thumbs that undermines every rule spy films usually have concerning their female characters. The picture is not about a Smurfette-like lone wolf succeeding in a man’s world, a la Atomic Blonde, but rather about two women who draw power from their friendship and the traditionally feminine qualities they possess in a much-needed subversion of not only the spy genre, but most studio fare. Audrey and Morgan’s character arcs are not organized along the traditionally masculine journeys of revenge, vengeance, or honor. Audrey’s growth takes place in relation to the world’s constant underestimation of her talents—a pattern of assumptions Audrey herself is not immune to. As for Morgan, who has been called “a little much” for her entire life and who doesn’t always play by the accepted rules of femininity, she finds power in the “extra” social space she inhabits. They both have one another’s support every step of the way. Much like underrepresented healthy female friendships that exist in real life (mainstream movies, predominantly written by men, tend to play up the manipulative nature of toxic female friendship), Audrey and Morgan’s relationship is never a source of tension. Female audience members will no doubt be grateful to watch a movie in which the female characters don’t solely exist within the framework of uncertain will-they-or-won’t-they romantic dynamics and catty female friendships, but rather have the stability of the unwavering support of a best friend. The balance of violence and comedy in The Spy Who Dumped Me doesn’t always work. Every viewer has their subjective level of tolerance when it comes to balancing these two elements, but The Spy Who Dumped Me is often clunky in its transitions from gruesome violence, especially enacted on innocent bystanders, to silly mayhem. The film asks us to care about the emotional journeys of Audrey and Morgan, but to turn that empathy meter down when it comes to the annoying, but well-intentioned Uber-driver-slash-DJ who is unwittingly pulled into their espionage game to unfortunate results. Still, in a media landscape and world in which violence is often enacted on women, it’s refreshing to watch a movie in which we never really worry about its female leads getting seriously hurt because, unlike most films, they are the stars of this movie. The Spy Who Dumped Me fails to stretch its subversive elements to other aspects of the genre, missing an opportunity to pay satirical homage to the spy film using more than just the lens of gender. While The Spy Who Dumped Me is excellent in its use of female friendship to tell a new kind of spy story, it falls back on lazy stereotypes of Eastern European and Russian spy archetypes that is particularly disappointing in a film that features a Ukranian-American actress as its star. Audrey and Morgan are plagued by Russian assassin Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno) who is defined by her uncaring brutality and her love of gymnastics. The character, while charismatic, feels more like a cariacture than anything else.
