Spy, 2015.

A pleasing, light-hearted film. It’s hard to find comedies that make this old dog so much as smile, let alone laugh. Spy, a satire on, well, spy films, is directed by Paul Feig, who was responsible for the feminist abortion that was 2016’s “woke” Ghostbusters. Watching Spy in this light, it is easy to see the feminist agenda, though it is pleasingly free of paedophilia, Satanism, anti-Trump rants, and heroic black men who make great fathers and are just so much wiser and better than the White Devil.

I enjoyed the film enormously. The central character, a fat bumbling but somehow lethally-effective CIA desk agent, is amusing and unthreatening. I imagine, were the film made a couple of years later, she would have gone off on anti-Trump rants every 30 seconds, but this was a more innocent age and so she is a kind of box wine cat lady auntie. The film is so nourishing for those in a bleak situation because of the love of character – every character is lovable, fun, my favourites being the Italian agent Aldo

and the Statham-esque Jason Statham.

Curiously, both characters are in a sense playing themselves – Aldo is the Italian cliche, loud, lecherous, fast, but as I was watching the film I thought “Italians are actually like this”. As Geoff Dyer wrote, somewhere, the favourite Italian pastime is to act like an Italian. And Statham is somehow both over the top and precisely himself – almost every Statham film features the man as the hard-headed, omni-competent, profane Sarf London brawler (though he’s actually from the Norf):

I’ve always liked Statham. His performances are so reliably insane

that I felt he must be smiling at himself and his image throughout. He has that very English intelligence, which learns to mask itself – in his case, his mask is Jason Statham. He excels here, my favourite being the scene where he appears in a rather nice suit and Melissa McCarthy’s cat lady says ” where did you get that suit?” and he snaps back: “I fucking made it, didn’t I?”

And so, you can have a film written & directed by someone who looks like this:

which is actually enjoyable for old dog fascists, somehow.