(MENAFN- Arab Times) LOS ANGELES March 16 (RTRS): If recent misfires like 'Tammy' and 'Identity Thief' have proved anything it's that Melissa McCarthy is virtually indestructible retaining her comic buoyancy her tremendous likability and much of her fan base even when stuck with bargain-basement material. All of which makes it even more gratifying to see what she can do with a vehicle that's firing on all cylinders for a change. In 'Spy' an uproarious blast of globe-trotting action-comedy delirium that doesn't spoof the espionage-thriller genre so much as drop a series of banana peels in its path McCarthy plays an eager-to-please desk jockey turned full-blown CIA operative who learns to wield a gun as skillfully as she does a one-liner a dazzling transformation that represents the actress's smartest funniest most versatile and fully sustained bigscreen showcase to date. Unsurprisingly her key collaborator here is once again Paul Feig who directed her to such show-stopping effect in 'Bridesmaids' and 'The Heat' and Fox's May 22 release will more than earn its place in the company of those past summer hits.
Richer If 'The Heat' (2013) placed its righteous gender politics front and center pairing McCarthy with Sandra Bullock as a happy corrective to the male-dominated buddy-comedy tradition then 'Spy' a vastly richer and more intricately conceived piece of work succeeds in scoring a subtler representational coup. To call it feminist would hardly be inaccurate but it might risk diminishing the singularity of McCarthy's achievement: It's not every woman (and certainly not every man) who can juggle the often-conflicting priorities of action and comedy as skillfully as she does here. Put another way it's hard to think of another performer male or female who could leap onto a motorcycle and immediately topple over sideways and pull off the gag with such fumbling precision or is it precise fumbling? that it can only be described as graceful. Admittedly Susan Cooper (McCarthy) a middle-aged analyst stuck behind a desk in a vermin-ridden basement at CIA headquarters doesn't seem wired for action at first. The film opens with an extended combat sequence in Bulgaria where a suave James Bond type named Bradley Fine (Jude Law) blows away a series of thugs as he tries to locate the whereabouts of a nuclear bomb. His secret weapon however turns out to be Susan who communicates with Fine via hidden earpiece using all manner of high-tech surveillance equipment to maneuver him past every obstacle and enemy assailant. It's a highly effective working relationship albeit one that invariably leaves the hard-working Susan feeling more like a secretary or assistant than an equal never mind that she has years of successful field training under her belt. It doesn't help that she's nursing a major unrequited crush on Fine who much like everyone else looks at her and sees a middle-aged overweight loner whose Agency career has probably already peaked. Structured Feig's beautifully structured zinger-stuffed screenplay mines no shortage of amusement from the spectacle of Susan being briefed and prepped for duty: The Agency's resident Q type fills her purse with high-tech gadgets all sadly disguised as items that a woman like her would carry (hemorrhoid patches stool softeners etc.). Meanwhile every phony alias and passport she's assigned is invariably that of some frumpy Midwestern tourist; as Susan notes 'I look like someone's homophobic aunt.' The comedy here has a double-edged shrewdness: On a certain level Feig and McCarthy may well be inviting us to laugh at the sight of Susan in a bouffant wig and an oversized cat T-shirt but they're also taking deliberate aim at the sort of mentality that would write her off as a hopelessly unattractive loser in the first place. Eventually Susan's mission takes her from Paris to Rome to Budapest guided via earpierce by her easily excitable colleague Nancy (the delightfully dithering Miranda Hart) and accompanied much of the time by an overly amorous Italian associate Aldo (British actor Peter Serafinowicz). Eventually Susan is required to drop the ugly-American guise and pass herself off as Rayna's personal bodyguard an inspired masquerade that allows her to undergo the sort of radiant physical makeover that between this and 'Identity Thief' is perhaps becoming a regular Melissa McCarthy movie trope. More crucially however it allows the actress's head-butting expletive-hurling take-no-prisoners personality to emerge in full force as Susan puts aside her earlier timidity and taps into the inner core of rage that as neatly foreshadowed in the script once made her one of the CIA's most promising (and vicious) trainees before she was sidelined into a desk job. Whether she's dangling from the bottom of a helicopter slamming a metal pot over the head of a knife-wielding assassin (Bollywood actress Nargis Fakhri) vomiting in disbelief over the corpse of a henchman she's just eliminated or kicking the crap out of a 'Swedish motherfer' just for the hell of it McCarthy's performance is a never-ending succession of priceless moments. For all her strengths as a verbal and physical performer there's a real core of emotion here too; remarkably she manages to pull all these disparate extremes of violence and comedy into a stirring coherent portrait of a woman motivated by love loyalty and a courageous if unrealized sense of her own inner worth.
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