Spies Like Us: Movie Review

Spies Like Us stars Chevy Chase as Emmett Fitz-Hume and Dan Aykroyd as Austin Millbarge. It was directed by John Landis from a screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and others. It was released in 1985, was a big hit at the time, and is often mentioned as a cult classic.

Warning: Major spoilers are blacked out like this: [blackout]secret[/blackout]. To view them, just select/highlight them.

Spies Like Us: Title

The title uses a classic title archetype, the protagonists, who are two spies.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel)

Spies Like Us: Logline

US intelligence promotes two incompetents, gives them perfunctory training, and sends them to draw attention away from real spies. But when the real spies are killed, the hapless dupes must carry out the mission for real.

(For more on loglines, see The Killogator Logline Formula)

Spies Like Us: Plot Summary

The Men

An American intelligence agency (disguised as the Ace Tomato Company) has located a new model of Soviet ICBM launcher and sends an elite team of secret agents to investigate it. But Soviet counter-intelligence has been having a lot of success, so the agency decides to find a couple of expendable employees, train them as spies and send them to draw attention away from the real mission.

Despite being a genius, Austin Millbarge works in a low-level job in the Pentagon. Emmett Fitz-Hume is the son of a diplomat and doesn’t take his job seriously. They both take the foreign service exam. Fitz-Hume tries to cheat, Millbarge becomes involved and they both fail. This makes them ideal patsies.

The Misson

The hapless pair are given perfunctory spy training at a special forces base and then parachuted into Pakistan. There, they’re immediately picked up by KGB agents posing as their contacts, but escape. They’re then captured by tribesmen and rescued by a United Nations medical team that includes a beautiful doctor, Karen Boyer, who Fitz-Hume immediately falls in love with. They pose as surgeons, but after a failed operation on a tribesman, they have to flee again.

They contact their controller, who’s surprised to discover they are still alive, but keeps up the pretence by ordering them into the Soviet Union. They see Karen and one of the other UN medics, and realise they must be the real spies. After following them across the mountains and over the border into the Soviet Union, Fitz-Hume is captured. The other spy is killed and so Karen teams up with Millbarge to rescue Fitz-Hume. She persuades the pair of them to help her complete the mission.

The Missile

Disguised as aliens, the three spies find the ICBM launcher they were ordered to locate and tranquillise the guards.

The spies’ controller orders them to enter some instructions into the launcher. [blackout]This results in the ICBM launching. [/blackout]

The general in charge [blackout]reveals the spies were sent to launch the ICBM in order to test a US anti-missile laser, show that it works and secure more funding. But the laser misses. Millbarge calculates they have less than an hour until a nuclear war destroys the world. The US general is unconcerned, convinced that the USA will win the war.[/blackout]

The spies and the guards [blackout]team up. Millbarge realises that he can reprogram the missile in flight, to explode harmlessly in space.[/blackout]

In the USA, [blackout]the General is arrested.[/blackout]

In the epilogue, Millbarge and Fitz-Hume [blackout]have returned to the diplomatic service and are seen in friendly competition with their new Soviet friends.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis)

Spies Like Us: Analysis

Spies Like Us Explained in a Nutshell

Millbarge and Fitz-Hume are supposed to be decoys to take the heat off a real spy mission to analyse a new Soviet missile. Through sheer plot armour, they bumble through until they are the only people left to carry out the real mission. They do that and reach the missile launcher. But then it turns out it’s all an even bigger set up. Rather than analysing the missile, the plan, which they’ve inadvertently helped along, was to launch it. Now the world is about to be destroyed by a nuclear war, but luckily the missile also has a self-destruct button, and so everything is fine.

The Plot Analysed

Spies Like Us has a Mission plot (see Spy Novel Plots). The Protagonists think their mission is to infiltrate the Soviet Union and investigate their new ICBM launcher, whilst in fact it’s to act as decoys for the real spies.

The ‘Mission’ Plot

The Protagonist:

1. Is given a mission to carry out by their Mentor.
2. Will be opposed by the Antagonist as they try to complete the mission.
3. Makes a plan to complete the Mission.
4. Trains and gathers resources for the Mission.
5. Involves one or more Allies in their Mission (Optionally, there is a romance sub-plot with one of the Allies).
6. Attempts to carry out the Mission, dealing with further Allies and Enemies as they meet them.
7. Is betrayed by an Ally or the Mentor (optionally).
8. Narrowly avoids capture by the Antagonist (or is captured and escapes).
9. Has a final confrontation with the Antagonist and completes (or fails to complete) the Mission.

1980s Comedy-Thriller

Spies Like Us is billed as a comedy-thriller, but really it’s a fish-out-of-water buddy comedy. The plot is really an excuse to string together a series of comic scenes, some almost irrelevant to the plot and included purely for laughs, such as the ‘training’ sequence, where sight gags abound. This gives the movie a contrived feel, almost like an extended sketch show. Like a lot of comedies, the audience is supposed to accept the implausibility as part of the comedy. How successful this is depends on the viewer’s opinion of the jokes, which are mostly plays on Fitz-Hume’s cowardice, laziness and general ineptitude.

Where Spies Like Us does shine is in its quick-fire one-liners. For example, when Fitz-Hume is being threatened with torture by the KGB.

KGB agent: For every wrong answer, I cut off a finger.
Fitz-Hume: Mine or yours?

And it’s a movie from the 1980s with 1980s humour and attitudes, so, if you’re easily offended, I guess you might not think much of the portrayal of women in the movie, though there’s nothing particularly appalling about it, just your standard 1980s clichés.

Characters

One of the main criticisms of Spies Like Us is that all the characters are stock comedy clichés. The two buddies might become friends, but they don’t change or grow during the movie, and the audience won’t develop anything much in the way of emotional investment in them as they bumble through training, across Pakistan and into the Soviet Union. This is one of the fundamental problems with comedy movies that largely consists of one-liners and sight gags: without some audience sympathy and emotional attachment, the story has no real heart.

The Problem with Combining Genres

Like many movies and novels (Olivia Joules for example), Spies Like Us combines two genres: comedy and spy thriller. Combining genres is a notoriously tricky process.

In a comedy-thriller, as the writer switches between the scenes that are primarily comedy to more serious spy-thriller scenes, it’s hard to maintain a consistent tone. The danger, of course, is that instead of complimenting each other, the genres detract. Instead of an exciting and funny movie, you end up with a movie that’s not all that funny, because it keeps trying to jam in thriller bits, and not all that exciting either, because the audience can’t take the jeopardy the characters are in seriously. That can lead to a story that doesn’t appeal to either audience – the comedy audience doesn’t enjoy the spy-thriller sections and vice versa.

This tone problem is why we don’t see many commercially successful cross-genre stories: the audience is small, as shown in this diagram:

So, perhaps the writers of Spies Like Us made the right decision in making the story a comedy, with just a little spy-thriller thrown in near the end. In this, the first half of the movie is more effective, and funnier. Near the end, the movie does become a semi-serious thriller as the protagonists capture the missile, inadvertently launch it and then calculate that the world has only an hour left until nuclear destruction.

The character’s initial response is to pair up and have sex (luckily for the heroes, the two hot girls choose them). Originally, this was the ending, giving shades of Doctor Strangelove, but the test audiences didn’t like the sudden lurch into black comedy, and so a happy ending was added. This is more in keeping with the frivolousness of the rest of the story. Spies Like Us is no Doctor Strangelove and shouldn’t try to be.

Spies Like Us: My Rating

A bit of fun. Fast-paced and with lots of jokes, it’s an out-and-out comedy, so try not to think about the plot too much.

Want to watch it?

Here’s the trailer:

The DVD is available on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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