Melissa McCarthy continues to prove she’s a force to be reckoned with in the latest comedy from writer/director Paul Feig, which mixes a genuinely thrilling spy story with filthy farce to delectable effect.

Loading

The perennially underestimated McCarthy stars as the perennially underestimated Susan Cooper, a CIA agent whose lack of confidence has seen her relegated to a basement where she acts as the eyes and ears to Jude Law’s super-spy on the field. Law’s Bradley Fine certainly looks (and with his old-school chauvinism, acts) the part, but it’s Cooper who gets him through the sticky situations with her clear-headed satellite guidance.However, when Fine becomes indisposed and Bulgarian arms dealer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne) reveals she knows the identities of all the other prominent super spies in the CIA (including Jason Statham’s brilliantly bolshy Richard Ford), Cooper decides to leave her desk job, go undercover, and finish the mission. Why? Because nobody could ever suspect she was a spy.

A great deal of sly humour is mined from Cooper’s generally unglamorous appearance. Where her male counterparts don tuxedos and cool aliases, Cooper gets to play a divorced mother-of-three from Iowa, or a ’cat mom’. Instead of flamethrowers and jet-packs, Cooper’s box of tricks is disguised in tubes of stool softener and treatment for fungal infections. It’s funny, but it’s also a gentle nod toward our preconceived notions of ‘women of a certain age’.

Loading

Feig’s frenzied, loose, and joke-crammed script really comes to life once Cooper hits the ground in Europe. As she’s forced to improvise her way out of a number of delightfully outrageous situations - all the while having her own exasperated in-ear guide, played giddily by Miranda Hart - Cooper finds herself pretending to be Boyanov’s bodyguard. Here, Cooper sheds her timid mother-figure shtick to become the balls-out CIA agent she was always meant to be, and Spy takes an astonishingly hard-edged turn.There’s a great juggling act at play here. Although a little overstuffed, Spy features a number of genuinely thrilling action sequences - a plane going down, motorbike vs car, a furious knife-fight - punctuated with moments of ridiculousness. This is a comedy, but it’s not a spoof, and while we’re laughing Spy continues to propel the espionage - and surprisingly visceral violence - forward at a clip.It’s all handled with remarkable ease by McCarthy, who never drops a stitch. We know she can carry the foul-mouthed attitude, but here she also demonstrates her remarkable grasp of physical comedy. She falls, flails and fights with a steely confidence, never once double-guessing the insanity to undermine the laughs. It’s a genuinely inspired performance, and it grounds some of the sillier parts of the script.She’s well supported across the board. As evidenced in Bridesmaids, Byrne is at the height of her comedic powers when she’s playing a villain, and her ruby-lipped aristocrat is a brilliant mix of cruel poshness and kitten-paw weakness. Statham, whose agent spends most of his time going to ridiculous lengths to convince Cooper that she’s not right for the gig, sends up his own tough guy persona gleefully here (“he means well,” says Cooper of the bumbling brit). Hart’s gentle giant is also a highlight, and the buddy-cop dynamic she shares with McCarthy lends real heart to Spy.