1. The Spy Who Dumped Me
There?s an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who
Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action
sequences, and lazy plot mechanics. The film teams Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon as
directionless thirtysomething best friends whose lives are turned upside down when Audrey
(Kunis) discovers that Drew (Justin Theroux), the handsome boyfriend who recently ghosted
her, isn?t just a guy who hosts an NPR podcast about jazz and economics, but a gun-toting,
globe-trotting C.I.A. agent embroiled in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse over that most
enduring of spy-film MacGuffins: a flash drive. When Drew is brutally murdered before their

2. eyes, Audrey and her bestie, Morgan (McKinnon), set off for Europe to get to the bottom of
an international conspiracy.
The rest of Susanna Fogel?s film is bog-standard espionage business, from secret
rendezvous to surveillance antics. And it?s all studded with indifferently staged shootouts,
car chases, and hand-to-hand combat? ThanosTV that are neither outlandish enough to be
humorous nor executed well enough to work as legitimate action sequences. Instead,
http://ow.ly/kj8i101nKyt ?re just kind of there, signifying excitement without actually producing
it at any point. The filmmakers are strangely fond of deploying bloodshed as a kind of shock
punchline, introducing some goofy comedic side character and then abruptly killing him off, a
technique that tends to feel arbitrary and even a little bit ugly.
The film?s blas attitude toward violence feels out of step with the low-key comedic energy of
its leads, who have the buzzy chemistry of a classic comedy duo like Martin and Lewis:
McKinnon the wacky, rubber-faced clown and Kunis her debonair straight-woman. The Spy
Who Dumped Me only really starts humming when it gives McKinnon the room to work her
unpredictable comedy magic?twisting her body like a pretzel and belting out her lines in
weird sing-song cadences?and Kunis has to bring her back down to Earth.