Best Bond spoof EVER! Jude Law as a spy with hay fever. A tubby sidekick who can't run for the bus. This comedy has a licence to make you guffaw, says BRIAN VINER

By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:34 EST, 4 June 2015 | Updated: 04:45 EST, 5 June 2015

Spy (15)

Verdict: Exhilaratingly silly 

Rating:

A sometimes uproarious, American-flavoured pastiche of the James Bond films, Spy opens with a deliciously daft pre-credits sequence in which CIA super-agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), confronting a terrorist over the location of a hidden nuclear bomb, loses control of his trigger finger following a sudden onset of hay fever.

Rather like the recent Kingsman: The Secret Service, Paul Feig’s highly entertaining film derives much of its comedy from a combination of everyday life, with its mundane issues and challenges, and the glamorous, dangerous world of international espionage. Thus, a secret agent who needs his antihistamines, and a CIA control room in Virginia afflicted with a serious pest-control problem.

Trying to rise above the rodent infestation is the Miss Moneypenny in Fine’s life, the overweight, lovelorn Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), whose control-room confidante, Nancy, is played by Miranda Hart. Alas, Hart proves to be one of the film’s few weaknesses. I’m a fan, but hers is a one-note act that works much better on the small screen.

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It’s not an especially original joke to make a crack operative of someone so evidently ill-equipped even to run for a bus, but McCarthy, a terrific physical comedian, pulls it off beautifully

It’s not an especially original joke to make a crack operative of someone so evidently ill-equipped even to run for a bus, but McCarthy, a terrific physical comedian, pulls it off beautifully

McCarthy, by contrast, has never been better, in her absolute element as the humble Cooper, who ascribes her low self-esteem to her mother raising her with the mantra: ‘Just blend in, let somebody else win!’

Through his earpiece, and sophisticated satellite technology, she can guide Fine through most perilous situations. But when he meets his match in the chilly but exquisite form of Bulgarian arms dealer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), conspiring in the inevitable plot to hold the world to ransom, it is Cooper herself who must replace him in the field.

She would like a sexy alias, but having been handed a distressingly prosaic one — Carol Jenkins — she is sent to Paris, then Rome and Budapest, where she proves herself unexpectedly adept at grappling with nasty heavies at the tops of high buildings.

There is also a wonderful scene in a restaurant kitchen — whether consciously or not, an almost perfect spoof of the epic fight in Gareth Evans’s martial-arts extravaganza, last year’s The Raid 2.

Of course, it’s not an especially original joke to make a crack operative of someone so evidently ill-equipped even to run for a bus, but McCarthy, a terrific physical comedian, pulls it off beautifully.

Paul Feig’s highly entertaining film derives much of its comedy from a combination of everyday life, with its mundane issues and challenges, and the glamorous, dangerous world of international espionage

Paul Feig’s highly entertaining film derives much of its comedy from a combination of everyday life, with its mundane issues and challenges, and the glamorous, dangerous world of international espionage

And the gag is ramped up by Jason Statham, playing an English former CIA agent, who seems to be the very alpha-male model of a spy, yet turns out to be a boasting, bumbling incompetent.

It is a perfectly pitched (if relentlessly foul-mouthed) turn from an actor not exactly known for comedy, but poking fun at his own more familiar screen persona with manifest glee.

DVD OF THE WEEK 

KAJAKI: THE TRUE STORY (Cert 15)

This harrowing and almost unbearably tense account of an actual event nearly nine years ago in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, when a group of British soldiers found themselves trapped in a minefield, hardly daring to move, is not like most war films. And it’s a quite remarkably accomplished debut by director Paul Katis 

  • Kajaki is out on Monday

Feig teamed McCarthy and Byrne with notable success in Bridesmaids (2011), so it’s no great surprise to see them in fine comic form here, Byrne again exploiting her svelte beauty just as cleverly as McCarthy does her rotundness.

But Statham’s performance is a revelation, and Law is splendidly funny, too, while most of the credit belongs to writer-director Feig, again showing his mastery of knockabout silliness.

You might disagree with me that Hart is something of a weak link, and I rather hope you do, because I was willing myself to laugh every time she appeared, yet never quite did. That feigned awkwardness in her own skin, which served her so well on her eponymous TV show, just becomes tiresome here, or at least, not nearly as funny as everything around it.

Otherwise, Spy is generally a delight, an illustrious addition to whatever might be the collective noun for spoof espionage films; suggestions, preferably in visible ink, on a postcard.

Survivor (12A)

Verdict: Watchably daft thriller

Rating:

The difference between Spy and James McTeigue’s thriller Survivor is not that one is preposterous and the other isn’t, but that one knows it and the other does not.

Milla Jovovich plays Kate Abbott, a security officer recently posted to the American Embassy in London, who ‘lost some of her best friends in 9/11’, is effortlessly fluent in Mandarin, Russian and Arabic, and can find her way at full tilt along the tunnels of London’s Underground even with ‘one of the most wanted assassins in the world’ on her tail. This is the so-called Watchmaker, played by none other than Pierce Brosnan, who has a nasty habit of stabbing his co-conspirators in the neck.

In Survivor, Pierce Brosnan has a nasty habit of stabbing his co-conspirators in the neck

In Survivor, Pierce Brosnan has a nasty habit of stabbing his co-conspirators in the neck

But before all this, Abbott finds that U.S. visas are being dished out to some rather suspicious applicants, evidently with the cooperation of someone on the inside.

Why are men with knowledge of dangerous, highly flammable gases applying to enter the United States? The answer involves a fiendish plot to blow up Times Square, and rather a lot of terrorist-inflicted carnage in London, which doesn’t seem to matter too much as long as the Big Apple stays intact.

It’s all thoroughly ludicrous, yet strangely watchable, as Abbott goes on the run not only from the Watchmaker and his cohorts but also her own people at the embassy, who are convinced she’s the baddie.

Only a couple of colleagues believe in her innocence, one of them played by Frances De La Tour in a wheelchair, whose dodgy American accent at one point has ‘the place crolling with Marines’. The best way to hide in a place crolling with heavily armed Marines, incidentally, is to duck behind a desk; Abbott is nothing if not resourceful.

Philip Shelby’s script contains some memorable clunkers, including one that detonated explosive mirth at the screening I attended, when it is solemnly noted that Brosnan’s fearsome assassin has ‘had so much reconstructive surgery that nobody knows what the hell he looks like’.

But Brosnan at least proves that he can act against type, and Jovovich makes a spirited heroine, issuing another refreshing reminder, along with Spy, that the Bonds and Bournes of this world are not necessarily blokes.

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