"Spy": A Feminist Espionage Film?

Now In Theaters

Melissa McCarthy is one of those actresses who has made her career in pretty much the only way a fat woman can make it in Hollywood: by being comically self-deprecating.  This often leaves her in supporting roles to the more classically attractive Hollywood stars, and she’s paid plenty of dues to succeed as a recognizable actress.  Now, in Spy, she shines on the center stage, and while it isn’t the greatest film around, it is certainly effective in demonstrating the deficiencies in not just Hollywood casting choices, but also in how the world treats women who don’t hold a certain body type.

McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, a support agent for the CIA who works in an office pool of (exclusively women) support agents, ensuring that their partner James Bond archetypes are properly equipped in the field.  When the identities of all the field agents are compromised, Susan volunteers to be put into the field to track down a rogue nuclear weapon.  As she travels between European locales, she discovers a self-confidence she never knew she had.

The greatest thing about this film is that, for once, McCarthy herself isn’t the punchline of most jokes, but rather the film’s biggest joke is that her entire support team is constantly underestimating her abilities.  In a fictional profession like genre-trope spying which is dominated by men and female characters designed to attract the male gaze, it’s remarkable to see a film utilize McCarthy in a way that demonstrates she is capable of being an action lead and is able to be empowered and attractive while doing so.  And the film’s primary source of comedy comes from the fact that her co-workers are so shocked that she can do anything just as amazing, if not more so, than her male counterparts.

However, despite this fantastically feminist portrayal, this isn’t as astounding as, say, Mad Max: Fury Road.  Perhaps this is an unfair comparison, but whereas Fury Road was both decidedly feminist and a brilliantly composed action movie, Spy is merely an adequate action-comedy with feminist subtext.  The action beats are well-executed, and the film serves up a decent, if forgettable, espionage narrative, but the biggest failure is that the film’s gags are consistently tepid.  Almost none of them are bad or offensive, but neither does the film encourage much uproarious laughter.  It hovers around a low chuckle, as the tonal shifts from scene to scene make it feel more like an action film that occasionally breaks out into comedy than a nuanced combination of the genres.

But still, I enjoyed Spy.  It would be a pretty forgettable movie were it not for McCarthy’s lead performance, and quite frankly, that’s enough this time.  I would love to see her tackle roles like this in the future, as she certainly has the charisma to lead a film if she has the right talent behind her.  It’s a slow week in the summer theatrical release schedule, so if you’re looking for a good movie this weekend, you could do a lot worse than Spy.

Is feminism on the rise in cinema?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Focus": A Film Without Focus

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

The con artist film and the romance film are very disparate genres, and that’s for a generally good reason.  While both genres are founded on the charisma and sexual appeal of their leads, the romance film is founded on the budding relationship of two people, how the two grow together and trust one another.  The con artist flick, on the other hand, is all about betraying the audience’s trust, spinning curveballs and half-truths in order to provide an engaging roller coaster of a plot.  These diametrically opposed film philosophies have been meshed before to make romantic con films, but Focus never quite seems to get beyond this crucial problem.

Enter Nicky (Will Smith), a seasoned con man.  After being ineffectually held-up by wannabe grifter Jess (Margot Robbie), Nicky decides to take her under his wing and guide her in the true art of thievery.  To go further into plot points would spoil many of the film’s twists, so for the folks who wish to see the film, I won’t go any further.  However, the film does a decent job at entertaining with several key scenes, including an extended gambling sequence with B.D. Wong as an eccentric businessman and an out-of-the-blue cut to an extremely minor character that leads to major ramifications.

However, despite these glimmers of cinematic taste, Focus never really comes into focus.  The romantic and con artist threads of the plot continually stumble over one another, meaning that the romance is never entirely believable and the ultimate reveal of the film’s long con is extremely underwhelming as the romance is underutilized.  It doesn’t help that the attempt to be both genres at once means that the film must simultaneously introduce the audience to the dynamics and intricacies of con work while developing a relationship between the two leads.  The film manages to do both, but only in the shallowest of ways, shifting back and forth between wanting us to believe what we’re seeing for the sake of fooling us and wanting us to believe because the characters’ emotions are, in fact, real.

And this isn’t without effort on the performers’ part either.  Robbie plays Jess with the right mix of naïveté and cunning to make her an engaging protégé to Smith’s smooth-talking and witty Nicky.  Yet, the film doesn’t give the characters enough screentime with one another where there isn’t a con going on, starving their supposed relationship of the witty repartee and genuine interaction necessary in order to make it believable.  Instead, the film tries to achieve this objective through their shared conning experience, which only left me waiting for a shoe-drop twist that would never come.

So while there are elements of Focus that I found quite entertaining, I can’t really recommend it.  There are some moments that truly made me wish they were part of a better film, and those moments may be enough for some people to find the experience worth it, but I personally found the film alternately boring and unfulfilling.  The big twist ending will certainly leave you underwhelmed, and you’ll likely forget all about it the next day.   I know I will.

What genre blends do you think work best?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Jupiter Ascending": Dead On The Cutting Room Floor

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Jupiter Ascending was originally supposed to be released in summer of last year, but it was delayed by six months to its February theatrical release.  There’s no official story as to why this delay happened, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Warner Brothers was not thrilled with the film for any number of reasons.  It could be that the film is so blatantly anti-capitalist that it made them nervous to release it in an unaltered form.  I think that primarily, though, the film ended up being too much of a big ideas space opera instead of a summer action diversion, and the studio didn’t think such a film could compete in the summer marketplace.  Regardless of the reason, though, Jupiter Ascending is now out for the world to see, and the final product falls way short of its potential.

The nicest way I can summarize the plot is to call it a mess: a jumbled interweaving of mythos and plot points that feel underserved by the narrative.  Our protagonist is Jupiter Jones, who happens to be an exact genetic match to the now-deceased queen of the universe.  For reasons that aren’t ever made entirely clear or logically explained, this entitles Jupiter to ownership over the queen’s universe-spanning empire.  The queen’s children all vie for Jupiter’s attention in order to increase their control over the universal marketplace, while Jupiter is bumped from sibling to sibling’s nefarious scheme, only to be saved by a new companion, a wolf-human hybrid who floats around on hover-shoes.  The particulars are a bit more complex than that, but many of the finer details are lost in the wake the film’s de-emphasis on plot.

What this film does not lack is creativity, weaving a mythology of Grays, robo-bureaucrats, planet-scale human harvests, giant lizard people, space mercenaries, etc.  Astoundingly enough, the film never feels overstuffed with all these elements in play, as the directing Wachowskis have clearly put a lot of thought, passion, and effort into making their interstellar community come to life.  Furthermore, the film is simply gorgeous, with diverse color palettes and engaging action sequences that make all those individual elements pop to life.

Unfortunately, though, the film is severely lacking in connective tissue that makes those isolated elements form into something coherent.  The film’s characters, particularly the protagonists Jupiter and wolf-man Caine Wise, come across as shallow and dull, as their significance and personalities are barely established before the film barrels headfirst into its action beats.  This has the ill-fated consequence of giving the action sequences no emotional weight, as the film has not laid the groundwork for a connection with either the setting or the characters.  And the film never really catches up after failing to establish that connection, its characters zipping between exposition and action in oddly repetitive ways, only to arrive at a beautifully-shot climax that is entirely lacking in emotional investment.

I strongly suspect that the reason the film was delayed was to re-edit it from an intellectual sci-fi film to a sci-fi action flick, as the action sequences are pushed so much to the foreground that the other elements of the film are subsumed.  And though the action pieces are very well-executed, it’s fairly obvious that the film was meant to be something more than mindless fun.  The pieces of an epic space opera are all there, but they haven’t been assembled in such a way as to make a good product.  I would be interested to see a Director’s Cut, which will probably never see the light of day due to the film’s box office performance.  It may not have ended up anywhere near perfect, but there’s too much ambition and creativity here for the original cut to have not at least been more interesting.

How do you feel about the Wachowskis’ mixed-bag of a career?  Are they misunderstood geniuses, or over-funded hacks?  Leave your thoughts the comments below.