Talkie Tuesday: The Spy Who Dumped Me

"Happy birthday, Audrey."

Hello everyone!

Question: what do you watch when you're bored out of your head, you don't feel like really thinking hard through whatever it is you'll be watching, and you REALLY don't feel like pulling a brain muscle trying to figure it out?  

Well, if you're currently waiting for the Outlander season four finale, then you'll probably pick up something that has Sam Heughan in it.

And since it's kind of the wrong time for A Princess for Christmas (one of the more adorable things I'd watched with Sam in it), you go for something a little more up-to-date.

And then you see photos of Sam in a tux holding a gun up in a very Bond-like position.

Why hello there, handsome!

The Spy Who Dumped Me is sort of a mix-and-mash of a lot of other spy movies, incorporating all the more insane ideas (not to mention the absurd ones) and making it all seem like a lark in comparison to, say, Bond or Bourne.

Yes, I know I'm late to the wagon with this one.

It happens to me a whole lot, I'll admit.

But like I said, I was bored out of my skull one evening, had nothing better to do, and felt like I could watch a comedy-type thing without feeling like I was overdoing it.

So I put in The Spy Who Dumped Me, fully believing that I was probably going to shut it off before long.

To my intense surprise, however, I laughed my way through the lot!

And it's really, really laughably ridiculous, but quite watchable, all things considered.

The story goes like this:

we actually start out with a shady looking person in a shady looking market with more shady looking people coming after him. Actor Justin Theroux who plays Drew makes a fairly good job of portraying a spy or secret agent, but he gets some bad news while in the middle of trying to get the heck out of Dodge.

His ex-girlfriend, Audrey (Mila Kunis), a cashier back in LA (who he dumped via text, which is SO Jonas brothers uncool), has had it with him not responding and, with a little nudge from her best friend Morgan, tells him she's setting his stuff on fire. This spurs the guy into action, and the audience figures out that, well, something in that box of things is probably valuable.

Before Drew can actually arrive, we're greeted by the lovely face of Sam Heughan as MI6 agent Sebastian, who sort of flirts with Audrey and then stuffs her into a van right after she makes a joke about said van, where she's told Drew is actually a CIA agent and that they need something of his.

Er, say what now, Jamie?

The nuthouse has only just begun, however, as Audrey arrives back to her apartmet to find Morgan with another of her one-night (or is it day?) stands, and while she's trying to explain the Drew thing to her, Drew himself arrives ... and the one-day stand turns out to be someone who's after Drew, and shoots him. Presumably dead.

The girls, meanwhile, get their shit together: Morgan pushes the (naked) assassin off the balcony, and then they hightail it out of there with a trophy of Drew's which he told Audrey she needs to take to a café in Vienna, otherwise a lot of people will die.

While Audrey's freaking out, Morgan's a go for it, so the girls travel to Vienna, and Sebastian pops up yet again demanding the trophy, as well as telling Audrey that everyone in the café is going to start shooting soon.

Which is actually what happens, in a bizarre sequence of events which lead to the café totally shot-up, the girls on the run, and Sebastian in posession of what he THINKS is the trophy, but turns out to be a fake, because Morgan was smart enough to fill their case with trophies back before they left LA.

As Sebastian's boss is Gillian Anderson, she's not only disappointed in the mission failure, but wondering what her life has come to after X-Files.

I agree, I have no clue either.

Leaving Sebastian and his partner to deal with their failure, we're back with the girls who, after getting out of the café, hijack a taxi and end up being chased through Vienna by men on motorcycles, but somehow the Americans outrun the lot and manage to grab a train to Prague after Morgan calls her parents and her father tells her about an old associate there who owes them a favour.

So yes, the girls make it to Prague, and you'd think their adventures would be over. But nope.

The "associate" or "family friend" turns out to be another spy, and he drugs the girls; having discovered Drew's trophy contained a flash drive, Audrey tries to make Morgan swallow it, but when they wake up tied in an old gymnastics training facility, she tells their captors, whom she recognizes as a couple she thought were Drew's parents, that she flushed the drive down the toilet.

At the same time, Sebastian and Duffer (his partner) are on their way to retrieve the drive or at the very least destroy it, and as the girls are about to be tortured by Nadedja (who I can't decide is a doll or an assassin or a gymnast or all three), Sebastian defies orders to go in and save them.

This includes but is not limited to vaulting off an upper storey to land and twist the neck of one ruffian, rolling into a shoot-out, and kicking a bomb into Nadedja's face so the lot can escape.

Still, the trio are then carted to Paris so Gillian Anderson herself can interrogate them, and Audrey repeats their story about flushing the drive down the toilet. While the girls are given tickets to America, Sebastian is placed on leave so that he can "consider the implications of his actions" bla bla bla.

For super secret spy agents, you'd think they'd have figured out where the toilet flushes by now and gone to find the actual drive, but this is a parody, so.

As Sebastian drives them to the airport, he explains a bit more about the people who'd kidnapped them (notorious criminals, in case no one has figured it out yet) and what was going on with Drew, and Audrey admits that she actually hid the flash drive in her vagina. Sebastian's face through this entire sequence is PRICELESS.

But unfortunately, he can't decrypt the drive, so it looks like they're stuck again, until Morgan decides to take matters into her own hands and calls none other but Edward Snowden, who apparently had a crush on her during one summer camp. That notwithstanding, he helps them crack the drive, and Sebastian realizes that the information contained on the little thing is basically enough to blackmail anybody with anything, as long as they have access to the internet.

The trio hightail it to Amsterdam to regroup and figure out what to do, but they kind of run out of luck when Duffer pops up to kill them and steal the drive. Luckily for them, their roommate (after the hilarious sequence prior to this when said roommate arrives and all three, Sebastian, Audrey and Morgan pull guns on him and he just goes 'Oh, Americans, ja?') comes back in time, thinks Duffer is robbing them, and slams him to the floor, breaking his neck.

Realizing that Duffer was going to sell the flash drive and that his phone is the best connection to the real criminals, the trio then take the phone (and Duffer's thumb to unlock it, because somehow nobody figures out they can disable that locking mechanism) and head to the agreed meeting place in Berlin.

Sebastian and Audrey pose as the Canadian Ambassador and his wife (because nobody ever remembers the Canadians!) while Morgan poses as a member of Cirque du Soleil, and the movie finally comes to a head with her going against Nadedja, who somehow survived the bomb.

Also, the fact that after Nadedja plunges to her death and is impaled, the Germans all just stand up and clap when Morgan lands, is VERY this day and age.

Meanwhile, Audrey is confronted by none other than Drew, who spins a yarn about how thinking of her got him through nearly dying, bla bla bla, and after he and Sebastian volley back and forth about who's lying, and Drew shoots Sebastian, she tricks Drew into getting his gun, and Morgan ends up throwing a cannonball at him. 

She's badass that way.

Drew is then arrested, and our trio walk away, because naturally Sebastian wore a vest under his tux that saved him, but not his poor broken ribs, which DON'T prevent him from kissing Audrey afterwards.

And as we flash forward to another of Audrey's birthdays, this time in Japan, the girls are undercover to stop some Japanese gangsters, right along with Sebastian.

See, persistence pays off - they're agents now!

Completely idiotic at times and ridiculously hilarious at others, this is the kind of movie you sit down to watch when you don't feel like watching anything else, and want a good laugh. Sam Heughan's handsome face doesn't hurt, either, so that's basically a plus.

And really ... just sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride!

xx

*images and video not mine