5 Secrets To Spy’s Success

On paper, it’s not terribly surprising that Spy won the box office this weekend, even if it did have to go up against a terrifying horror movie, and Insidious 3. Nestled comfortably between the high notes of Pitch Perfect 2 and the high everything of Ted 2, Spy offered a welcome respite for viewers already exhausted by the mass blockbuster destruction of the summer movie season. Seeing as we’re due for at least four other action-espionage flicks before the year is over (Kingsman having already set the table in February with its punk Bond riff), Spy couldn’t have picked a genre more in need of a preemptive good ribbing. But this latest win for director Paul Feig and star Melissa McCarthy doesn’t owe entirely to precision timing: Spy, most importantly, is just a really funny, well-made, and original comedy. By carefully walking the line between earnest imitation and loving send-up of other spy movies, Spy won over audiences, and will likely enjoy a healthy run at the box office. Studios looking to replicate Spy’s success in the future should pay attention to the following things that it gets dead right, and that make Spy more than just the latest spin on a successful formula. 1) Market A Movie That Sells (Even If It's Not As Good As The One You Made) Trailers for Spy hit two points over and over again: pedigree and premise. McCarthy has been one of the most bankable comedic leads of the last few years, and a bona fide box office good luck charm in supporting roles since Bridesmaids. But it’s the stars that rise the fastest that most often invite popular backlash. Apathy caused by overexposure of the McCarthy brand is ameliorated once you throw Feig’s name into the mix. Ads have ensured that anyone who didn’t care for Tammy or Identity Thief knows right away that Spy comes from the team behind Bridesmaids and The Heat, McCarthy’s two most successful vehicles to date. When selling Spy itself, the appeal is clear and simple: what if an inexperienced desk jockey is the only one the C.I.A. can trust to go out in the field and save the world? Seeing as a driver’s is the most dangerous license that the average audience member has, most viewers can more realistically identify with McCarthy’s Susan Cooper than they can 007 and Bourne. All the more reason, then, for marketing to focus on how unqualified Cooper is, via a lot of pratfalls and embarrassing disguises. Serious spy movies let us fantasize about the ideal version of ourselves, but a comedy with this premise runs on a certain degree of schadenfreude. Getting butts in the seat by asking viewers to laugh at Cooper is cynical, but great comedy is often built out of subverted expectations - it’s once you’ve got an audience that you can start to surprise them. 2) Don’t Constrain Your Star McCarthy’s atypical-for-Hollywood figure and willingness to commit to a bit has made her easy to box into two types of roles: the supportive sad sack, and the foul-mouthed bully. Spy wisely allows McCarthy to play at both ends of the spectrum. There’s a turn midway through the film that forces Cooper to adopt a new persona, and on a dime she pivots from being a timid doormat to a ball-busting alpha dog. It’s a shift that doesn’t risk stretching the premise, because the movie has already established that Cooper’s incompetence is more a matter of self-confidence than skills. But the more important thing that Feig’s script does is choose not to stick to just those two sides of the equation. Cooper has to filter her own multi-faceted personality through the various identities she has to adopt, and the result is a performance from McCarthy that’s incredibly nuanced. Spy’s sense of humor often goes big and broad, but McCarthy’s versatility allows her to pitch jokes with a number of different curves and speeds. By the end of the film, Cooper has firmly established relationships with almost every major supporting character, each reflecting one of the many different roles McCarthy has had to carry up until this point. Speaking of which… 3) Stack The Cast With Concealed Weapons It’s one thing to simply hire a bunch of talented actors to backup your star. It’s another to know how to use them well, especially in a comedy. Rose Byrne’s comic chops have been proven since at least Bridesmaid’s (and, sure enough, she’s absolutely hilarious in Spy), but the rest of the cast doesn’t immediately read like a slam dunk. Miranda Hart is mostly an unknown to American audiences, Jason Statham hasn’t done a supporting comedy role in over a decade, and asking Jude Law to do an American accent is like shaving Samson. The risks pay off brilliantly: Law’s performance is all the funnier for looking like a British superspy while sounding like a smug American, and learning how many tools are in Hart’s comic belt makes many of her scenes a delightful surprise. It’s Statham who’s the real revelation here, though, playing an absurd meathead as he often does, just with his petard permanently stuck in the “hoisted” position. More than just writing to the strengths of the actors comically, Feig’s script takes the time to make the characters silly but important to the story in their own unique ways. That we end up liking all of these characters, be they dolts, douches, or bad girls, makes Spy as generous as it often is crude. 4) Work Within Your Means A $65 million budget is huge for a comedy, but it’s a pittance for a comedy that’s trying to mimic the globetrotting story beats and expensive setpieces of a spycraft thriller. To put it in perspective: $65 million buys you a Goldeneye in 1995, and only one third of a Skyfall in 2012. Inevitably, the concessions Spy has to make to work within this milieu make themselves known. There’s a not-terribly-convincing CG jet that the film has to cut to during an otherwise impressive mid-flight action sequence, and the final helicopter chase looks laughably fake (though that’s not necessarily a negative -more on that in a bit). Where Spy makes smart, frugal decisions is in how Feig chooses to shoot many of the smaller action scenes. Fistfights focus on the actors pulling off flashy, joke-laced singular takedowns, which helps hide the limited number of extras and small shooting spaces. Spy’s R rating entitles it to be not just as foul, but also as violent as it desires, which can make for a blessing or a crutch. While truly orgiastic volumes of blood and gore have their comic appeal, splatter effects are used sparingly here. Again, Feig chooses to emphasize smaller, detail-packed highlights instead of trying to draw a digital bloodbath. What you get on screen is the core essence of spy movie action, just with very little of the excess. Plus, being a comedy means Spy can have fun by explicitly playing up how un-glamorous its version of this kind of blockbuster is. Which leads us to maybe the most important takeaway… 5) Remember: You’re A Comedy Spy feels like a complete, real movie because it treats itself like one. It toys with spy movie conventions, but it’s not a parody or tongue-in-cheek satire. It has a plot, it has characters, and those characters change thanks to that plot. But the film never forgets that the best way it can get you to invest in its story is by making sure you laugh the whole way through. Too often, comedic genre spins get so caught up in the imitation that they forget to actually be funny. Take last year’s Let’s Be Cops for instance, an ostensible comedy that tried to be to cop movies what Spy is to espionage. In addition to being just painfully uninspired for its first two thirds, Let’s Be Cops sealed its misguided fate when deciding to spend its last act actually being the kind of movie it had heretofore been mocking. Spy risks falling into the same trap with its own last act, once the plot gets tangled in the expected twists and betrayals of the genre, and commits to a setpiece crescendo. But because Spy has laid a strong foundation beforehand, and continues to poke fun at the craziness on screen as it climaxes, the finale is not only satisfying, but works within its budgetary limitations. Yes, the helicopter chase looks unconvincing, but because the setpiece works on a comedic level first and foremost, your enjoyment of the experience isn’t diminished. Spy’s ability to identify the real appeal of espionage movies is the reason its can be both faithful and funny. Is it the intricate double-dealing and spectacle that matters to you by the end of a spy movie, or is it more important that you’ve had an entertaining ride with a cast of memorable characters? Spy achieves the latter expertly, which is why it should be seen as a role model for not just future comedies, but spy movies too.