OK, so this looks like an interes...oh my God! its another bloody Bond parody!! seriously!!! Yes the modern age feminist hipster, Paul Feig, takes a swing at the Bond genre, and oh what an original concept that is, gee I wonder what we'll see here...ugh!
So naturally its an adult comedy with lashings of semi-serious action, CGI blood, swearing and a whole heap of Melissa McCarthy and other actresses. Basically the plot revolves around McCarthy playing Cooper, a desk jockey CIA analyst who helps the very suave, completely cliched character of Fine played by Jude Law. Yep, if you ever wanted to see what it would be like having Jude Law as Bond, well here you go. After a botched mission Fine is supposedly killed off and the CIA need someone to take his place, an unknown, hence they can't use Statham who plays another totally cliched agent character we've all seen before. We then follow Cooper around as she slowly but surely sinks deeper and deeper into a mission, which she was never really suppose to get into in the first place (she was only meant to be surveillance).
Oh geez where to start, the plot is unoriginal sure, we all know that, but how about some original ideas...oh too late. From the very first scene I had a good idea what this film was aiming at and how the characters would play out. Spoiler alert! but the minute you see Law as this debonair spy, you know he's obviously gonna die early on, he's clearly the plot setup for McCarthy's Cooper, I mean come on, who didn't see that?! But wait! as the film progresses and more and more characters are introduced, we start to see double agents and characters popping up outta nowhere who are suddenly spies or assassins. All of sudden characters we saw at the start who appeared to just be the butt of a joke or background fodder, are now main characters out to kill the protagonist. Its at this point you know that anyone is fair game and anyone can surprisingly come back from the dead when you thought they had been killed off. So I quickly realised that Jude Law probably wasn't dead at all. Seeing as we didn't actually see him die, clearly he can come back, and he did...*groan*
The plot is a mess of characters bouncing back and forth between the goodies and the baddies. Seriously, there are characters popping up all over the place, getting whacked, and then replaced minutes later by new ones, only to get killed just as quickly. The ones that don't get killed, you just know are probably gonna turn out to be secret agents, but on either side. I honesty thought Law's character of Fine was gonna keep flippin' sides! he was a goodie, then a baddie, then a goodie again, but at this point I genuinely suspected he would turn on Cooper yet again right at the death, and then get properly killed off. Amazingly the film beat me on that one, but this film could of kept spinning these characters round and round, one double agent twist after another.
The actual characters are a completely mixed bag of nuts that all had one thing in common, none of them managed to actually make me laugh...at any point. McCarthy was...well, pretty much like McCarthy is in every bloody movie she's ever done (whilst looking oddly like Dawn French at one point), whilst her sidekick, played by Brit Miranda Hart, was just simply annoying and unfunny. I swear, an early scene near the start has McCarthy and Law in conversation at dinner, they are both talking about themselves and offering basic foreshadowing of things to come. Now initially there are moments that made me smile (as there were throughout this film), but this obviously intended funny sequence just went on and on and on...it just didn't f*cking stop. Like seriously, the moment has passed, the joke is over, its not funny anymore its just awkwardly embarrassing, stop flogging this dead horse!!
The only characters that did offer some genuine giggles were Statham as a dumb, cocky but tough agent, nothing gobsmackingly funny mind you, but reasonable. Next to him I quite liked Peter Serafinowicz as the slimy Italian (yet another secret agent) Aldo who can't keep his hands off the ladies. Sure this character felt like a cheesy Carry-On character (something I would of thought was beyond the realms of acceptance for Feig), but his antics were amusing. Other than that everyone was just there, doing exactly what you expected them to be doing with these character types. Get a load of Law by the way, how much flippin' makeup?? Oh and both Statham and the main baddie fall into the lake from that helicopter at the end, so why does only Statham survive?
I know this movie was relatively successful but I don't really understand why. Yes some parts were good such as the gadgets sequence near the start which is obviously yet more parodies of a certain franchise, and I did quite like how the main female villain was a spoilt bratty Princess type, although again that did become annoying at times too. But in general everything just felt very generic to me and relied far too much on feeble visual gags including male genitals and slapstick, lots of profanity and lots of weight/looks shaming jabs. Even the inclusion of lots of blood and a bit of gore didn't do anything for me, that just felt unnecessary and shoved in to appease the male audience. I would say this was more enjoyable than 'The Heat' which was pretty dire, but at the end of the day, I found this to be an infantile, factory assembly line, cookie cutter of a flick.
4.5/10
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