McCarthy! Byrne! Statham! It sounds unbeatable! In fact it’s just uneven fun – often hilarious, but perhaps not the slam-dunk you’d expect from the director of the brilliant Bridesmaids. McCarthy is a force of nature as smart but downtrodden Susan Cooper, a CIA intel operative (she’s the voice in Jude Law’s ear) who escapes the desk when her slimy Bond-alike agent takes an early bath. Shedding her initially dowdy disguise, Cooper glams up to follow Rose Byrne’s villainous Rayna Boyanov across Europe, with feet, fists and F-bombs flying.
As before, neither Feig nor McCarthy are afraid of taking the low road in pursuit of a laugh – it’s hard to imagine anyone else getting away with a running sexual-harassment gag that McCarthy makes inappropriately empowering. Jason Statham proves himself to be every bit as self-aware as you hoped, riffing on his gruff tough-guy persona with an admirably straight face, raising plenty of punchy laughs in the process. Miranda Hart seems to have been parachuted in from a different movie as Cooper’s goofy sidekick, and Allison Janney lends moral support from HQ. But this is McCarthy’s show all the way, and you sense that many of her best lines weren’t in the script, writer-director Feig having the confidence to just light the touchpaper and stand well back.
