In keeping with the new Hollywood feminism that Ocean’s 8 kicked off at the beginning of the summer (everything now being a roundabout reaction to #MeToo), Susanna Fogel’s The Spy Who Dumped Me offers not eight but two women constantly underestimated by anyone apart from each other. One might say the primary basis of Audrey Stockton (Mila Kunis) and Morgan Freeman’s (Kate McKinnon)–she always gets a reservation at restaurants thanks to her name–friendship is a shared mutual belief in their respective greatness that no one else can see.
Morgan, at the bare minimum, also has her parents (played by Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser) to further corroborate that she isn’t “a little much” (as Audrey’s spy boyfriend, Drew Thayer [Justin Theroux, constantly and suspiciously comfortable as “the douche”], puts it the night he first meets both of them). Audrey, on the other hand, now doesn’t even have Drew to convince her that she’s anything more than average, as he has broken up with her in a text message right before her birthday. And since being average was one of the very first fears Audrey confessed to Drew (in addition to the fact that she can never seem to finish anything she starts) when they met, the breakup comes as a particular sting. Almost as though, in one fell swoop, Drew confirmed her worst self-impressions of being both boring and incapable of completing a “task”–in this case, a relationship.
But there, as always, to cheer her up, is Morgan, who throws a party in honor of Audrey’s thirtieth that allows her to make use of the microphone she usually happens to be carrying around with her. Unfortunately, Morgan is the one with the sexual luck that night as she encounters an objectifying Ukrainian (“is it Ukraine or the Ukraine?”) she later brings back to the apartment after helping Audrey burn all of Drew’s shit as she vengefully screams about his underwear, “Time to wipe your own ass!”
Of course, in the back of her mind like all women who are masochists as a result of feeling, she is remorseful for her actions, and secretly hopes he’ll return to take her back–which does happen, just not without ulterior motive. For all men must have one in order to persist in communing with women they’ve already dubbed day old bread. So it is that he returns to her with gunfire hot on his trail to give her specific instructions about taking his miniature fantasy football trophy (for second place) to Vienna to fulfill a rendezvous that he can no longer make, being shot and all. His only caveat: don’t trust anybody. So she doesn’t. That is, except Morgan, who encourages the adventure in the car by reasoning, “Do you wanna die having never been to Europe or do you wanna go to Europe and die having been to Europe?” “Why are those my only two options?” Audrey demands. But isn’t that always how life works, getting to choose between shit sandwich or shit cereal?
So off they go, where all the expected intrigue and random bouts of gunplay, identity reveals and red herrings one expects from a spy movie occur (especially when the word “spy” is built into the title. And even “Tinker Tailor Stoner Spy” gets a nod in Amsterdam. Shit, on a totally separate note, even Mandy Patinkin gets a mention somehow, and that’s just always an A+ on esoteric references).
Director Fogel, accustomed to the female friendship movie (her debut was Life Partners starring Gillian Jacobs and Leighton Meester), finds a sparring partner in her co-writer David Iserson (best known for his TV credits, including Saturday Night Live, Mad Men and Mr. Robot), manifesting in the “sisterly” dialogue between Audrey and Morgan. In truth, one of the foundations of the narrative is the belief that best friends are so often the sister that one was meant to have, the person a girl can truly be no holds barred with in terms of sharing all of her secrets. Secrets that can prove useful when involved in an international incident that requires being two steps ahead. Something that Sebastian Henshaw (Sam Heughan), Drew’s foil at MI6, likes to be. Except with the highly sensitive nature of the drive contained within the trophy, it’s impossible to be anything other than two steps back. What it’s not impossible to be is a nice romantic segue for Audrey, increasingly in her element in the art of espionage. And while the director of MI6, Wendy (Gillian Anderson), deemed “the Beyonce of the government” by Morgan for “not sacrificing an ounce of [her] femininity,” might not think these two are essential to her operation, they suddenly have become just that.
As a scary Russian gymnast/assassin named Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno) chases the mark on their heads with the instruction to find and kill “two stupid American women” in one of the most comedic scenes of the film, she finds herself turning in every direction to find precisely this description on the tourism front. In fact, Audrey and Morgan’s entire distinctly American take on Europe is just what one would expect from a country where half the population doesn’t even have a passport, with Morgan making such comments about Vienna as, “They’re really trying to play up the fact that Mozart was from here instead of Hitler.” To this point, it can be said that you have to be slightly naive to ever have the gumption to take the road less traveled, which is, in the end, what The Spy Who Dumped Me ultimately seeks to laud.
And yet, this is just one of Hollywood’s many fallacies sprinkled upon viewers who want only the reassurance of possibility as opposed to the galvanization to actually pursue it. If you are living an average life, The Spy Who Dumped Me offers, there is always a way out should you choose to answer “the call.” In short, if you’re willing to sacrifice the warm, coma-like comfort of complacency in favor of the alternate demoralization of never knowing when you might find the luxury of predictability again, there is a loophole out of the ordinary. But then, that’s the grand lie of not only The Spy Who Dumped Me, but any female/action/self-discovery movie (of which Thelma and Louise is the prototype). This notion that 1) a call will be provided in the first place and 2) the person in question would ever have the courage to answer it.
