Critic Reviews

An innovative genre blend that overcomes its bagginess thanks to sharp character comedy and a wildly appealing central dynamic.

Don’t be fooled by its awful title. The Spy Who Dumped Me is the rare secret-agent spoof that doesn’t double-O-suck.

Though the story goes a country too far and gets lost in its dénouement, the movie is, for the most part, a playful and giddy delight.

Ms. McKinnon is too inventive to make the character a standard, zany rom-com sidekick. There is no real precedent for her highly disciplined comic anarchy, but Ms. McKinnon reminds me a little of Peter Sellers in her command of voice, face and body and her ability to turn every scene into a popcorn popper of verbal and physical surprise.

To say it’s all over the place, a frenzied collection of hits and misses, is to both capture its shortcomings and deliver a fairly cogent plot summary. But as directed by Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners”) from a script she wrote with David Iserson, the movie also has a playfully vicious screwball energy that consistently locates the violence in every joke, the humor in every kill.

It’s tough to sustain a story line this thin for two hours, and the movie runs down at the two-thirds mark.

McKinnon is all excess, all the time, and The Spy Who Dumped Me—a solid comedy, overall—gives us another chance to bask in that.

The women both in front of and behind the camera work wonders in subverting genre expectations, but not in the hokey, pandering way that female-led blockbusters so often settle for.

One of those late-summer releases that’s just good enough to make you wish it were better, The Spy Who Dumped Me aims to please every step of the way, but it never earns the nearly two-hour running time.

Unfortunately, The Spy Who Dumped Me struggles to tell a story as compelling as its two leads.