The Spy Who Dumped Me is best female buddy action flick in years

THERE have been very few purely female-driven buddy-action movies over the years, but the Spy Who Dumped Me is one of the best efforts in the genre to date.

OVER time, there have been so few, purely female-driven buddy-action movies. Perhaps unfairly so.

For now, it is in no way selling The Spy Who Dumped Me short to say it is one of the best efforts in the genre to date.

OK, so it doesn’t have to beat much. Doesn’t matter in this case.

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Anything that extinguishes the memory of Melissa McCarthy and Sofia Vergara in Spy (or for that matter, Reese Witherspoon and Vergara in Hot Pursuit) has to be for the greater good.

The reason why The Spy Who Dumped Me retains a decent load of levity is all about the peculiar and ungainly chemistry exhibited by its two leads, Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon.

They play hapless BFFs caught up in a dangerous international conspiracy after one of them gets dumped via text message on the eve of her 30th birthday.

Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis in The Spy Who Dumped Me. Picture: (Hopper Stone/Lionsgate

Audrey (Kunis), a part-time cashier at an up-market food store, had spent the past year thinking her hunky ex Drew (Justin Theroux) was the host of an obscure jazz podcast.

Now it turns out he has been running black-ops for the CIA against some decidedly unpleasant Euro-nasties.

As is often the case in espionage movies these days, everybody wants to know the whereabouts and contents of a thumb drive that may or may not be in the possession of Audrey. (The exact location of the drive, when finally revealed, is not for the faint-hearted, but most amusing nonetheless.)

Once this very easy-to-follow set-up is bedded down, Audrey and her easily distracted bestie Morgan (McKinnon) spend the rest of the picture being chased, shot at and generally harassed all over the globe.

Kate McKinnon in her breakout performance in The Spy Who Dumped Me. Picture: Hopper Stone/Lionsgate

Morgan is very much the breakout character of the movie, a mercurial and irrepressibly impulsive presence that generates almost all of the best scenes.

If you don’t get where she is coming from — or where the heck she is heading — then The Spy Who Dumped Me is probably not for you.

One of Morgan’s many bizarro traits is her joyful tendency to over-share every last shred of information with people who would rather be none the wiser. (With the notable exception of her mother, hilariously played by Jane Curtin, who enjoys receiving all of Morgan’s incoming and outgoing sexts.)

One more significant sticking point re The Spy Who Dumped Me: the action scenes are incongruously full-on for a movie of this type.

The going can get ferociously, gorily violent at times, and not always to the intended comic effect.

Nevertheless, there is the attraction of plenty of well-earned weird wildcard laughs (and the welcome bonus of McKinnon in her best screen role to date) to meet the standards of comedy fans who have been starved of the good stuff for a while now.

THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME (MA15+)

***

Director: Susanna Fogel (Life Partners)

Starring: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Gillian Anderson.

When surviving a breakup is a matter of laugh and death