At the start of the film, they’re commiserating over Audrey’s dickish boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux) dumping her by text, the week before her birthday. On the night of her party, just as she and Morgan are about to burn his remaining possessions, he gets back in touch and inadvertently brings a bunch of international espionage down on their heads. Among his other foibles, Drew is a CIA agent on the run from his bosses and a bevy of assassins, dropping the two friends into a dangerous mission to deliver a crucial McGuffin across Europe. As reviewers have remarked since its Stateside release earlier this month, it’s tonally all over the place. While it treads the well-covered spy spoof territory, its use of violence soars right past the Bond movies’ high watermark of Casino Royale in the first ten minutes and nestles itself in the lower echelons of a Liam Neeson thriller. Most of these spy comedies aren’t quite so violent, and over the course of this film’s running time, it’s not very hard to see why. While we’re no prudes about screen violence, it’s the way in which the film springs violence on the audience that really jars. For the most part, it’s an energetic accidental spy caper, but the brutal deaths and injury detail are more chilling than chucklesome. If it’s not being played straight, there’s a crippling absence of comic timing to the sudden extreme bloody moments, which pepper the film like machine gun fire through the skull of a random funny character you actually quite liked. Co-written by Fogel and David Iserson, the script isn’t so slight as to leave the film leaning on improvised bits, but it still feels light on laughs. Short of some amusing stunt work by Ivanna Sakhno’s deadly assassin, a Ukrainian gymnast who uses gymnastics equipment to murder her prey in a more distinctly Bond-flavoured turn, and a truly inspired sight gag involving someone’s thumb, it’s difficult to say that there are many other hilarious moments. While Paul Reiser and Jane Curtin have a scene-stealing extended cameo as Morgan’s exceptionally unflappable parents, their appearances feel like the most intact of the running gags. Elsewhere, the convoluted spy mystery plot is by-numbers and uninvolving, which wouldn’t matter so much if the comedy was hitting harder. Marooned in the middle of these arcs is Gillian Anderson, whose thankless background role might as well be a reprisal of her exact part from Johnny English Reborn. The Spy Who Dumped Me is in UK cinemas now.
