Spy Review

Spy is a comedy directed by Paul Feig. It stars Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Rose Byrne and Jude Law. The premise basically follows McCarthys' character, who plays a desk bound agent, and her transformation into a field agent. 

I'm going to start by saying that I was getting pretty sick of Melissa McCarthy. She always plays the same character. A rude, loud, obnoxious character. It really got old (for me at least) pretty fast. So I thought that this would be the same type of role for her. Surprisingly it isn't. The film starts with her being a pretty shy agent. She only sits behind a desk and tells the field agent where to go and what to do. She is very insecure, but she gets her chance to become a field agent due to some unfortunate events. She is really funny for most of the film, but she does start to turn into the same type of McCarthy character she always plays. She starts falling down, and insulting everyone. Thankfully it isn't as bad as in her other films so it can be pretty funny at times. The best actor in this movie is by far Jason Statham. He has some really funny monologues that feel like self-parody, and I loved it. Plus they don't over use him. He gets the perfect amount of screen time so it never feels like he is over doing it. Another surprise was Rose Byrne as the villain. I never thought she could actually play a villain, but she proved me wrong. She is awesome here. The only character that I had a problem with was with McCarthys' best friend. Her jokes rarely got a laugh out of me, and she got kind of annoying at times.

One thing that I never expected was how good the action was. Paul Feig just proved that he would make a really cool action movie. It is all shot very well, and has great choreography. In most spy comedy films the action is almost always just intended for comedic purposes and never actually focuses on actually being legit action. Spy gets major props on that front. When I think about it the action was even better than the comedy because a lot of the jokes here didn't hit for me. This is the type of comedy that has joke after joke after joke. When a comedy does that not everything is going to hit, and I wish they would have balanced out the comedy with the action instead of trying to go with a straight up comedy. 

Spy really surprised me. McCarthy wasn't annoying like I though she would be. Statham and Byrne were very very funny, and the action was fantastic. I do wish that they would have taken it easy with the comedy since so many jokes at once won't really hit, and I also wish they created a better story. The story here is extremely predictable, and you just know how the film is going to end since the very beginning. Another minor problem I had was the fact that the green screen (when used) was very noticeable and took me out of the movie, as well as some VFX shots. I do recommend seeing Spy though. It has some really funny moments, and some very cool action scenes. It does have a lot of shortcomings, but it is still pretty enjoyable. 3.5/5