The Spy Who Loved Me: Flipping the Script

In every spy move since, well, ever, dashing men have run through scenes, avoiding bullets and bedding buxom beauties. In the genre-tilting spy comedy?The Spy Who Dumped Me, Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon play Audrey Stockton and her best friend/roommate, Morgan Freeman, who inadvertently become drawn in to a plot where the free world is at stake.

When Drew (Justin Theroux) dumps Audrey, she goes into a tailspin extending into her birthday. It’s an existential crisis that ends being an?international?crisis when Drew shows up, announces that she is in possession of a super-important package, and that she must get it to Vienna. Suddenly, Audrey and Morgan decide to follow through on Drew’s mission, and end up crossing paths with MI-6’s Sebastian Henshaw (Sam Heughan) and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj), who are investigating Drew at the orders of Gillian Anderson’s Wendy. Running around Europe, dodging the gymnast-turned-assassin Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), calling Morgan’s parents (Carl Reiner and Jane Curtain) periodically for help, and proving to be at least as effective as the real spies, our two heroines prove to be just what the world needs.

The Spy Who Dumped Me?is clearly a send-up of James Bond specifically, but ironically, in this woman power redux, Kunis doesn’t bed a string of heartthrobs. She doesn’t need to. She cusses, fights, and shoots her way through the situations the men can’t accomplish, and ends up using her greatest asset, her mind, to overturn the global conspiracy. In hilarious fashion, Kunis and McKinnon have more on-screen chemistry than the RT rating might lead you to believe. Sure, it’s profane and periodically cruder than it needs to be, but it’s also kind of sweet – two best friends making their way in a world that would otherwise dismiss them.