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…
