Someone was too drunk to edit this film down to ninety minutes. Convoluted plot. Premise was low key messed up. Probably the most annoying thing about this movie was the boyfriend facts that Mila Kunis’s character brings up are all before the action of the film, so we are relying on random information dumps from her and her friend to know if stuff is true or suspicious or what. I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time, because these actresses are on fire and have excellent sensibilities, but this was kind of a mess. Other people smarter than me have written about how it’s a movie on wheels going through all the tropes of a spy movie without innovation. There’s some generalized disappointment about what could’ve been better. So, I don’t feel like I need to say much more than, go read those people.
The Pop Culture Detective’s episode on Abduction as Romance has a lot of interesting things to say about the tropes of a tired genre of films that SWDM follows and the harm that they do to people in the real world.
Lastly, we are blessed to live in a world where there are alternatives to this hot garbage. If you’re looking for a good film in the same ballpark, try Melissa McCarthy’s Spy. Or, another sleeper hit from 2015, Mr Right, starring the amazing Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell, in one of the most delightful assassin-dating-girl-next-door-under-false-pretenses movies I’ve ever seen. We saw it when Wife’s sister was in town the week before our wedding and it was really fun, despite making less than $400k of its 8 million dollar budget (yikes). If I cared more about this movie, I would bother to break down the differences, but it’s not really worth saying any more than has already been said. Like any other fuck-up, we should all act like this didn’t happen and move on with our lives.
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