Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a self-effacing, overweight, desk-bound CIA mission controller, spends her days in a verminous CIA basement talking into the earpiece of her glamorous field agent coun­ter­part. When he’s killed before her remote eyes and other field agents are com­pro­mised, she goes into the field for the first time and soon blossoms into a deadly agent.

I had never seen McCarthy in anything before and I assumed that Spy would be a dumb, gross-out comedy. It was better than I feared and genuinely funny at times. McCarthy inhabits several personas, ranging from the initial doormat of an analyst through her cover as a guileless midwestern tourist to her assumed cover as a hard-as-nails bodyguard, and she is funny and oc­ca­sion­al­ly touching. Her per­for­mance is better than the script, which, while amusing, is lazy and clichéd.