Writer/director Paul Feig is a kind of one-man campaign against the neglect of talented women by the Hollywood film Industry. He broke through – after a lengthy career in television supporting roles – with the female-focused Bridesmaids and followed it in 2013 with The Heat, which cast two women, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, in the kind of roles – a Boston cop and an FBI agent – that are traditionally associated with men. Now he has released Spy, a secret agent send-up with women (McCarthy, Rose Byrne and English sitcom-star Miranda Hart) again playing the main roles. He even begins shooting an all-girl reboot of Ghostbusters in two weeks time.
In Spy, McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, an office-bound CIA operative, who in the film’s prologue directs a Bond-style agent, Bradley Fine (Jude Law), around a mansion in search of a nuclear bomb, warning him of the goons and villains around him he can’t see – but she can, on her computer.
When Fine is apparently assassinated by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), an icily glamorous villain with gravity-defying hair, Cooper demands that she be allowed into the field to avenge his death. Since there is no one else available, Cooper is put on the case and – in typical spy movie fashion – she chases around Europe (Paris and Rome) in an attempt to trace and infiltrate the arms gang.
To complement a rash of inventive sight gags, Feig sets up a series of confrontations between the main characters in Spy in which they hurl arias of profane put-downs at each other, and what is different from other McCarthy films like Tammy or Identity Thief is that the insults are genuinely funny.
Although she is operating in a fantasy setting, McCarthy is more human in Spy than we have been used to from her and quite a bit of the humour comes from her fish-out-of-water insecurity. But she is helped throughout by the quality of support she is given, especially Byrne as the movie’s snooty super villain and Jason Statham who is truly hilarious in a straight send-up of the geezer tough guy roles that have characterised his career – with Spy, Statham expands his appeal radically.
Queen & Country is a sequel to John Boorman’s much-liked, Oscar-nominated 1986 coming of age drama, Hope & Glory. It picks up the story of Boorman’s alter ego, Bill Rohan (now played by Callum Turner), nine years after the end of WWII, when he’s old enough to be conscripted for military service as the Korean War seems a new threat.
At the training camp Bill quickly befriends a troublemaker named Percy (Caleb Landry Jones), and the two of them while away their days, teaching new recruits to type and read maps and plotting revenge against their sadistic, by-the-book superior played by David Thewlis.
Most of the story of Queen & Country takes place within the confines of the camp, but Boorman occasionally has Bill take his friend to his bungalow home on a small island in the Thames – where the final stretch of Hope & Glory took place – and there he meets the young hero’s colourfully eccentric extended family. Bill also falls in love with a beautiful young woman (Tamsin Egerton) who’s so troubled and mysterious that she won’t even tell him her name – he dubs her Ophelia.
I can’t say much more about Queen & Country – I won’t see it until Friday afternoon. There will be a special showing at the Lighthouse in Smithfield at 6.30pm on Monday next, followed by a question-and-answer session with the director, which I’ll be conducting. The movie will then go on release on Friday of next week.
