‘Do you think this will ever end?’ my companion whispered, as we neared the two-hour mark of this hyperactive but laughless piece of lowbrow idiocy. It’s as old as the hills, but the truism that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ is obviously one that has never appealed to writer/director Susanna Fogel. Or maybe the movie just seemed really long because of the face-pulling hamminess of Kate McKinnon. Tiresome in the extreme, her MO as a comedienne has a similar effect on me as the noise of a nail being drawn across a blackboard. She co-stars here with the less objectionable Mila Kunis in a spy spoof that is short on wit but high in its body count – it really is extraordinary the level of gun violence that we blithely accept on screen these days, even in a flick that is meant to be light hearted. As Morgan and Audrey, the girls find themselves embroiled in the helter-skelter challenge of keeping a memory stick loaded with earth-shattering secrets from falling into the hands of the evil empire du jour. There are oodles of red herrings and double crosses as they are chased from Vienna to Paris to Prague… and maybe Budapest, too. I lost track of their itinerary at about the same time that I gave up on the plot’s convolutions. It’s a frenetic Cook’s Tour of Europe and our heroines manage to outsmart and stay one step ahead of their pursuers, while all the time never being entirely sure of whom they can trust. Chisel-jawed, blond Sebastian (Sam Heughan), because he is a dead-ringer for Roger Moore, with the Pommy accent to boot, is too handsome to be anything but a good guy and you get the impression that he and Audrey are destined to end up in the sack together – not that there is any time for romance. The spy genre is tricky to lampoon because it is camp to begin with, but this misses the mark spectacularly. Come back soon, Johnny English.
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