I saw the new Spy.

It’s a Melissa McCarthy movie.

Actually, that’s not accurate. As Derek described it, it’s someone trying to do a two hour Archer episode focused solely on Pam and Cheryl. Which, on one hand I really like Archer but it’s a bit much for two straight hours.

I make reference to it being a Melissa McCarthy movie since the only point of comparison I have is Bridesmaids. I liked Bridesmaids but there’s a tendency for that type of humour to devolve into the lowest common denominator kind of jokes. Which is to say there’s a fair bit of toilet humour or people falling down shticks. The toilet humour was definitely prevalent in Bridesmaids and the people falling down rode strong in Spy.

It’s also a movie that is quite fond of swearing. I’m not a Victorian prude but that gag certainly wore itself out much faster than the movie thought it did. Jason Stathom’s character nearly hinges on basically being loud and obscene for most of his moments and there’s a second act turn when Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) relies on some quick improvisation to rescue her rather flimsy cover and goes with a foul mouthed body-guard explanation which overstays its welcome.

Overall, it’s an okay movie. I had some laughs with it, at it and then at the audience.

What it is not, however, is a good satire of the spy movie genre.

I think that’s the biggest disappointment for me. Granted, I knew little about the film and it wouldn’t have registered at all on my radar had I not heard that it was scoring so well on critic reviews. It’s hardly the first to take jabs at the genre which holds James Bond as one of the defining movie franchises. Even Kingsman takes many a potshot at international espionage and men of mystery.

Generally speaking, I find that spoofs of the spy genre end up falling a bit flat. The best of the bunch–in my opinion–is Archer and it keeps itself going by leaving a lot of the spy elements as dressing and dipping in and out of a half-serious, half-joking action motif. The few other success stories follow a similar pattern: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Red or even Burn After Reading. They certainly have a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments but they still treat their narrative with just the right amount of gravitas that it doesn’t devolve entirely into a Three Stooges type slapstick farce.

And I think that’s the tricky part of doing spoofs of spy movies. As I’ve mentioned, James Bond is really the big flagship for the genre but–and I say this as a massive James Bond fan–the series is half a joke. It’s filled with its own cliches and tropes that it pokes fun at enough times that it’s often times a parody of itself. It’s hard to satire something that’s already making fun of itself and certainly hard to keep it up for an entire original piece.

The best satires usually work by pointing out the flaws of genres or trends which are popular and unaware of their own weaknesses. Murder by Death and Clue work as great spoofs of the mystery detective genre because it takes all the dowdy seriousness and spins it on its head. It can stick its tongue out at the irritating habits that crop up in those genres. like detectives taking incredible leaps of logic, confusing final reveals designed solely to bedazzle its readership or the oft times mindless pile of bodies that accrue in an investigation because the original works pull those tricks again and again without even being aware of stereotypes they’re fulfilling.

The spy genre, unfortunately, doesn’t have these ubiquitous elements to lampoon because they, themselves, are not ubiquitous. Sure, we can make fun of James Bond tropes but those tropes aren’t universal amongst the handful of spy movies that get released. For example, a common scene to parody in these types of movies is the James Bond gets new equipment from Q moments. And while there’s plenty of standard elements amongst the Bond series for how these scenes play out, you’re not going to find them anywhere in things like the Bourne Identity, Cambridge Spies or Argo. But sure enough, the scene crops up in Spy like clockwork, focusing its time on pointing out how ludicrous a meeting with some technowizard like division would be in a spy agency despite the fact that it’s almost always played for cheese laughs in the Bonds in the first place.

Thus what ends up happening is that the laughs feel rather cheap. It’s a lot of going through the motions in Spy without really bringing anything to the table. A number of the jokes also hinge on the fact that Melissa McCarthy is a large woman and puts emphasis on how “gross” that is, either through constantly giving her undesirable and socially outcast cover identities or filling her gadget gear with things like haemorrhoid wipe pads.

It’s very American in its comedy, so if we’re not talking about stool solvents or rodent scat, we’re dropping vulgarity for the sake of padding out dialogue or flashing photographs of a person’s genitalia. And when you’re right out of ideas about what to do next, have an incredibly awkward and incongruous celebrity guest appearance and milk that for a few empty laughs more.

Which is a shame, because there is a workable concept in there. There’s a couple of times when Melissa McCarthy does do some decent action-spy elements that, had it been a greater focus, would have worked better. There’s a scene where she gets her handler to cut the power to a casino so that she can take out a squad of armed thugs in the dark without blowing her cover which, had the movie decided to lean on that trope more, I feel could have been a stronger narrative.

On the other hand, this could simply be me just wanting there to be more spy movies because it’s a genre that’s basically died out. This movie certainly found its audience and is pleasing someone despite how cheap it is most of the time. It could very well be a case of “not for me” with a side dash of “wanting what’s not around any more.”

But I don’t think I’m alone. Sure, Archer is hardly the definition of high-brow comedy but it still works. I think there’s interest in the spy genre outside of slapstick American comedy.

We’ll probably have to wait for the superhero craze to die out before that sees a resurgence though. The action genre is pretty dominated by that subculture for the moment and they’re unrelenting in their stranglehold on the comedy-action scene. One day, though… one day.