I Spy

Last weekend, we watched a trio of spy movies, so I thought I’d combine in a single post

Eagle Eye (2008) seems to be the perfect form of a genre of movies I am interested in - the surveillance paranoia movie. Ideally, it should feature one or two people fighting shadowy opponents who have access to panopticon surveillance (preferably involving a satellite). I thought that was what Source Code. I was getting closer with Enemy of the State. But this is what I was thinking of.

Shia Lebeouf is an ordinary guy with a brother in the military who just died. After the funeral, he gets a phone call, telling him not to go to his apartment. When he ignores this, he finds a ton of terrorist weapons there, and the FBI grabs him. Meanwhile, single mother Michelle Monaghan (also in Source Code!) is sending her son on a field trip to Washington DC. She gets a phone call telling her to get in a car at a certain address. When she disobeys, she sees her son on a tv and gets a threat.

When Lebeouf gets broken out of the FBI office by a construction crane, he is told to go to a car at a certain address, and there it is with Monaghan driving. There is a crazy car chase, with assists from the traffic light system and some more cranes. Neither knows what is going on.

But of course we figure it out. It’s no spoiler to say that the voice on the phone is a computer system that has become intelligent, and has an agenda. Meanwhile, FBI agent Billy Bob Thornton and Air Force investigator Rosario Dawson are on the trail of Lebeouf and Monaghan, and maybe the big computer. And is Defense Secretary Michael Chiklis one of the good guys or the bad guys?

I enjoyed the heck out of this movie, while recognizing its absurdity. Great car chases and clever escapes, with all kinds of sub-quests. Which never make sense: the super-intelligent computer seems to excel at creating rickety Rube Goldberg machines that barely work, while having the resources to just up and kill anybody she wants.

Red Sparrow (2018) is a bit more modern - an Atomic Blonde look at the origin story of a Black Widow-like character. It takes place in Moscow. In a park, CIA agent Joel Edgerton is meeting his double agent. When the cops show up, he fires a gun to draw attention and let his agent get away. This gets him in hot water.

Meanwhile, ballerina Jennifer Lawrence breaks her leg while performing, and gets sidelined. She tries to coach (if ballerinas have coaches), but she brutally beats the principal dancer and her replacement when she finds them sexing. And I mean brutally - blood everywhere. It kind of comes out of nowhere.

Anyway, JLaw’s creepy uncle Matthias Schoenaerts recruits her for spy school - actually, “Sparrow” school. Sparrows are sexy secret agents who use seduction to get their info. The school is pretty creepy, run by Charlotte Rampling. When she beats up a fellow student who tries to rape her, she beats him bloody. Rampling demands that she let him have sex with her, since that’s the point of the training. So, she demands that he do it then and there, then stares him impotent. It’s a gruesome scene, but Lawrence’s best. It’s easy to believe that she could wilt a man.

In fact, she’s the best thing here. She has a very Anna Karina look, with her huge eyes and bangs - my favorite New Wave actress. Joel Edgerton, on the other hand, didn’t impress us much. Several people refer to him as “that handsome American,” but I don’t see it. He has beady little eyes and is lumpy around the face. Not a bad actor, but nothing special I could see.

Same with the rest of the movie. There isn’t a lot of action, the suspense is a little light, but there is a good ending. There’s a sort of sequel setup, but I don’t see it happening.

Finally, The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018). It stars Mila Kunis as a boring single woman, who has just been dumped by her boyfriend. By text. On her birthday. Her best friend is Kate McKinnon, a bit of a drama queen who convinces her to burn all of the stuff her ex left at her apartment. But her ex, Justin Theroux, is actually a spy, who is busy being shot at. He just has time to beg Kunis not to burn his stuff.

Meanwhile, the girls get picked up, then kidnapped by another set of spies, lead by sexy Sam Heughan. Heughan tells them that Theroux is CIA and they need to get in touch. When Theroux does show up, he tells Kunis that if he is killed, she has to take his McGuffin to a cafe in Vienna. There is a shoot out, and he is killed. So the girls are going to Vienna.

There are no big surprises in this movie. It’s the old ordinary folks mixed up with spies story. The fun is in the execution. Kunis is a solid character, but McKinnon is a hoot. She reminds me a bit of Sandra Bernhardt - that kind of crazy kooky beauty. Her character spends all her time on the phone with her mother, talking about their sex lives. She dated Ed Snowden (that seems like a throwaway line, but it comes in handy). When they are at the circus, looking for an agent, she joins the act and gets up on the trapeze, based on having attended a circus arts class at camp.

That also brings me to the best villain, Ivanna Sakhno, gymnast and assassin. She has a deadly pixie look - reminded me of Rinko Kikuchi. She battles McKinnon on the trapezes and...

I won’t spoil it. This is a fun movie - even if it isn’t the most original idea, it is beautifully carried out. They do seem to be trying to use gross out humor for shock value. Like Melissa McCarthy saying “fuck”a lot, this isn’t really too impressive. The girls’ friendship is the key to it all.