Farce and parody are the dual carriage of sanity

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2008)

It is a comedy and it is funny. But why is it so funny? It is funny first because it is a parody of American society, of the small middle class of working people who are not particularly swift and definitely not lucky but they just do what they do with some desire to get some satisfaction out of it. Maybe even some profit or benefit. The favors of a woman, or some extra investment money. Nothing really serious but just five plastic surgery operations for the bargain price of $25,000. And that would give some dynamic ambition to anyone, and anything would be good enough to make that extra money. When you add to that the fact that everyone is playing around with another woman or another man, and the film remains within the limits of straight-dom, you have it all. The spy-apprentices will get entangled with the adulterous spouses and the situation is unbelievably complex, and lethal if not plain deadly. But then the film  and it starts with that  is situated all around one third rank CIA executive, hence with spies and other undercover actions and activities. But since most people in that situation are not in any way listed as active spies, the CIA top boss  if there is one  just wonders what it is all about and his reaction will be to clean up the situation. And the clean-up will be drastic. Only the three women will survive: the spouse of the spy, the spouse of the security service chap and the unmarried woman who wants to finance her plastic surgery. The two spouses are free since the two men they were married to end up dead. And the third woman is happy too since the CIA pays for the plastic surgery to bury the business. In other words the film is a big parody of many other films, and first of all Mission Impossible, but transferred to the level of the dummies who read all the books especially written for them, and these dummies in this film are definitely dim. And then the rest is quid pro quo (both imbroglio and legal meaning) and crazy situational complications. It turns the very serious security problems of the 21st century into a farce, and we think somewhere that after all they are a farce which makes the film absolutely righteous.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines