Spy

Paul Feig’s 2015 film keeps analyst Susan Cooper at a CIA desk, running a field agent through his earpiece, until every cover is blown. The decisive choice is where the joke is aimed. Susan’s body and competence are never the target: she does the real work, while the comedy loads onto Rick Ford, who recites impossible heroics in one breath and does none of them. The other thread is institutional: the agency hands her Carol Jenkins, a Midwestern single mother of four, then Penny Morgan, an Iowa cat lady, before she reaches the Casino di Roma as Amber Valentine. The humiliation is in how the place packages her, not in anything she gets wrong. Feig wanted no spoof but a real spy film with real stakes, and told Jason Statham to have fun yet play it dead straight. He told stunt coordinator J. J. Perry the same: leave the comedy to him, make the action hard. That is why the kitchen knife fight reads as a fight first. The Paris and Rome scenes are Budapest. The disc carries a longer cut released as unrated. A good fit if you want the fights staged for real and the jokes set beside the action, not on top of it. Not for anyone who cannot ride dialogue where swearing is sentence structure.