Spy: Extended Cut on Blu-ray – The DVDfever Review

Spy proves that hayfever can be a killer.

That’s because super spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) tracks down Tihomir Boyanov (Raad Rawi), the only man who knows the location of a huge bomb. Alas, while they have a conversation, Fine sneezes and Boyanov is inadvertently brown bread.

While I was initially sceptical that a film lasting 130 minutes was a good idea for a comedy – since ideally, snappy, decent comedies last around 90 minutes without outlasting their welcome – this opening gambit was the first of many jokes which came big and regular.

Melissa McCarthy takes the lead as accidental spy Susan Cooper, who we first see in her long-serving put-upon role of co-ordinating attacks from the CIA in Langley, as she has access to the infra-red drone surveillance footage and can direct Bradley in his missions. There’s also a tale of workplace unrequited love in there (who hasn’t been there! – cue deep sighs from everyone reading this since it’s universally known) since she has a crush on him, while he just assumes she’s a typical cat lady.

Unfortunately, it also features Miranda Hart as one of her colleagues, Nancy. I used to find Miranda funny when she first came to the fore with her radio series, Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop – which later became the TV series, Miranda – but after two series of the latter I’d had enough of that and now she just has one joke carrying her along which is the prat-fall.

Hollywood – if you want to hire a British actress who has comic timing in spades, hire Sarah Moyle! As well as a recent cameo in Sean Penn’s actioner The Gunman, Sarah regularly appears in the BBC soap Doctors, as receptionist Valerie Pitman, and you can see an example of her comic talents in this mash-up .

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The plot (yes, it has one) is that a nuke is on its way to New York for the UN General Leaders’ assembly, and with Boyanov no longer around, Susan finds a lead which takes her to tracking down his offspring, Rayna (Rose Byrne – whose evil Russian character bizarrely has a posh, British accent, making her sound more like Rupert Everett at times), since she knows the identities of all the CIA’s top agents. With Susan the only unknown to her, she gets the spy job.

There are many great cast members here including Jason Statham sending up his hard guy image as Rick Ford, who constantly plays top trumps with himself with his constant boasts, such as: “I know I can’t die because I once ingested 179 different types of poison. I know this because I ingested them all at once, when I was deep undercover, in an underground, poison-ingesting crime ring. It was like dog fighting… and rich people bet whether we would live or die.”

However, there’s one scene between him and McCarthy where he concludes that she finds him intense, yet the second trailer had a better line, which surprisingly isn’t used here, where instead she cowers: “You’re kinda starting to freak me out!”

Peter Serafinowicz‘s character is intentionally sleazy and he sounds like Serge Gainsbourg when he tried to show off to Whitney Houston on the French chat show Champs élysées, telling her he wants to 'fuck her' .

And let’s bring Anton back for the sequel and give him more lines. The extras, showing him getting turned on by Susan’s cuss words, were brilliant.

Kudos also to the theme song featured here. While the film sends up the James Bond franchise brilliantly, Ivy Levan‘s Who Can You Trust adds that extra finesse. And, quite frankly, it pisses all over Sam Smith’s Spectre drawl, Writing’s On The Wall. And Spectre, itself, was such a disappointment, but Spy combined with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation brings us everything a single Bond film should’ve deleted and yet completely failed to do.

Spy has many laugh-out-loud moments – far more than I was expecting from a Paul Feig movie – so I’m really looking forward to the sequel, but given that they’ve saved 11 minutes for the Blu-ray version – when they could’ve fitted into the cinema version quite happily, I’ll wait for the Blu-ray.

Now when we get Spy 2, please just replace Miranda with Sarah Moyle and then everything will be sweet and dandy, thankyou.

In addition, maybe I might give Bridesmaids and The Heat a try. I dismissed these as chick flicks, and like with Miranda, I really cannot see what the Americans see in Chris O’Dowd, so I’ll just pretend he’s Jar Jar Binks. That character was easily ignored in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. However, getting me on board for a female Ghostbusters movie is a tough ask. Then again, while the first film was unsurpassable, Ghostbusters II was dreadful.

And in further addition, there’s more after the credits, so stay with them!

Go to page 2 for the presentation and the extras.

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The film is presented in the original 2.35:1 widescreen ratio and in 1080p high definition and you’d be surprised if it was not a top-notch transfer for a brand new film. There are no issues with it whatsoever. For the record, I watched this on a Panasonic 50″ Plasma TV.

The sound is in DTS HD 7.1 and while it’s not a special effects movie, there’s a fair bit of action filling the speakers as you’d expect.

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The extras are as follows:

• Redacted Scenes (3:13): aka deleted scenes, but put there in spy-like terminology.. All of these feature Miranda Hart getting more screen time, and the first two are variants of the same scene. They really do not need to be included.

• Classified Alternate Scenes (31:51): 15 scenes, including two that have different versions of the same scene. I don’t think that any of them need to be put back in, mainly because the film lasts 130 minutes as it is, and even at that length it works far more than you’d expect a long comedy to do. Still, these are alternate takes shot at the time which work best as extras, and they are certainly worth a one-through.

• Extra Top Secret Behind-the-Scenes Gag Reel (6:39): Outtakes by any other name.

• Director of Intelligence Feig makes the cast do his bidding (8:53): Director Paul Feig shouts instructions from off-set. It sounds like it’s easy to be in one of his films – you don’t have to learn any lines, as he just shouts them at you one at a time. Cue plenty of corpsing.

• Susan and her men (8:18): A collection of McCarthy’s alternate clips where she’s starred opposite men.

• Super villain Rayna can’t keep it together (5:05): Some alternate takes and corpsing, all featuring Rose Byrne.

• Super Vermin (1:34): Some aditional shots of the cast working with rats.

• The many deaths of Anton (0:57): Alternate last words.

• The trouble with covers (2:28): Not sure where ‘covers’ comes into it, but it’s more fluffs.

• The Great Rick Ford (3:42): Jason Statham’s character gets some more outtakes, often with others.

• For Your Eyes Only: Jokes-a-plenty (13:25): Plenty more alternate scenes.

• The handsy world of spies (1:52): Mostly groping.

• Speaking is an art form (1:57): More fluffed lines.

• Super Villains of the Animal World (2:19): More from the rats and other uncontrollable creatures.

• How Spy was made (48:46): A making-of split into several parts, but there isn’t a ‘play all’ option this time, which is odd. However, there’s plenty of cast and crew chat, plus on-set filming.

• Gallery: 30 images

• Theatrical trailer (1:52): In the original 2.35:1 theatrical ratio. There’s another one I prefer, however, which I linked to on the first page.

• Easter Egg (4:34): Not quite a music video for Ivy Levan’s main theme, “Who Can You Trust?”, but more a still of the lady while the song plays.

  To view this, keep pressing ‘right’ to go along ‘play’, ‘setup’, ‘search’ and ‘extras’ and then the next one will reveal this.

• Audio commentary: There’s no cast members here, but you get director Paul Feig, director of photography Bob Yeoman, gaffer John Vecchio, producer Jessie Henderson and fight co-ordinator Wally Garcia.

The menu features clips and stills from the film set to the full version of the Bond-style theme tune – quite a rarity since most menus only give you a brief snatch of it. Chapters are plentiful with 32, and there’s also subtitles in English, Spanish and French for the film as well as the commentary track, and also an ‘English text’ track…. which is blank. Huh?

Again, despite the multiple language and subtitle tracks, Fox do the public down by only listing English on the box. Then again, I know people enjoy reading my reviews for the accurate information in this department.

Spy: Extended Cut is out now on Blu-ray and DVD, and click on the packshot for the full-size image.

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FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS	9 10 8 7
OVERALL	8.5

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Detailed specs:

Cert:
Running time: 130 minutes (Extended version) / 119 minutes (Theatrical version)
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Cat.no.: 6256007001
Year: 2015
Released: November 9th 2015
Chapters: 32
Picture: 1080p High Definition
Sound: DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 (English only), DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1
Languages: DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 (English), Dolby Digital 5.1: Spanish, French
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, plus commentary tracks in English, Spanish, French; Fnglish text
Format: 2.35:1 (ARRIRAW (2.8K))
Disc Format: BD50

Director: Paul Feig
Producers: Peter Chernin, Michele Colombo, Paul Feig, Jessie Henderson and Jenno Topping
Screenplay: Paul Feig
Music: Theodore Shapiro

Cast:
Susan Cooper: Melissa McCarthy
Bradley Fine: Jude Law
Rayna Boyanov: Rose Byrne
Rick Ford: Jason Statham
Elaine Crocker: Allison Janney
Sergio De Luca: Bobby Cannavale
Aldo: Peter Serafinowicz
Anton: Björn Gustafsson
Karen Walker: Morena Baccarin
Nancy B Artingstall: Miranda Hart
Matthew Wright: Carlos Ponce
Timothy Cress: Will Yun Lee
Himself: Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson
Tihomir Boyanov: Raad Rawi
Solsa Dudaev: Richard Brake
Sharon: Jessica Chaffin
John: Sam Richardson
Katherine: Katie Dippold
Jaime the Gardener: Jaime Pacheco
DC French Waiter: Romain Apelbaum
Alan the Bartender: Steve Bannos
Patrick: Michael McDonald
Agent in Jetpack: Adam Ray
Taxi Driver: Lukács Bicskey
Shopkeeper: Attila Bardóczy
Nicola: Julian Miller
Paris Waiter: Ed Kear
Lia: Nargis Fakhri
Verka Serduchka: Andrey Danilko
Italian Guy #1: Attila Árpa
Italian Guy #2: Adorjáni Bálint
Drunken Guest at Paris Hotel: Paul Feig (uncredited)