It has a plot and a cast that seem cooked up during a hallucinatory fever dream. It shouldn’t work, but it does – and so splendidly, too. In Paul Feig’s comedy Spy, Melissa McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, a timid CIA desk agent who gets sent out into the field by her fearsome boss (Alison Janney) after the death of her slick Bond-like colleague, Bradley Fine (Jude Law, in a rare comedic turn). The cast is full of delightful surprises. Rose Bryne is a stiletto-clad Oxford-educated villainess with quips so brutal that she makes Regina George look like Barney. Peter Serafinowicz does a game turn as an – admittedly very pre-#MeToo – cringey Italian pervert figure named Aldo (“like the shoe store found in American malls”).
And in the film’s most magnificent twist, Jason Statham parodies the hard-as-nails action leads he’s played over the years as a hard-edged buffoon with “a habit of doing things that people say I can’t do: walk through fire, water-ski blindfolded, take up piano at a late age”. That’s not even to mention whatever it is that’s going on between the English comedian Miranda Hart, who stars as Susan’s best friend and co-conspirator, and American rapper 50 Cent, who plays himself.
