Reading Mad magazine and finding the Spy vs. Spy strip was always one of the highlights of reading the rag back in the day since the black and white spies tended to bash each other left and right ceaselessly without any clear victor to the ongoing feud. To hear that there’s been a movie based on it that’s been in development for the past decade is a little exciting but it’s also a wonder why it’s taken so long to finally bring it out into the open. It’s easy to think that a story line might be a little difficult to come up with if only because the strip was usually a handful of panels long at best and carried the same overall them with it since the two spies were continually at odds with each other and were doing their best to ruin each other’s plans and get one over on each other. A movie that’s basically a tit for tat kind of ordeal would get old pretty quickly and might be better off as an animated affair as it was seen on Mad TV back in the day. Kevin Burwick of MovieWeb is of the mind however that a big-name actor such as Dwayne Johnson would be able to step into a role and make it happen, but given that he’s likely to be busy, as he usually is, and one would have to either tap Kevin Hart, or someone that’s equally as great with Johnson, it does feel as though it might be best if the roles were left to comedians that could make the spies stand out in a big way. Personally I can see Bill Hader and someone like Aziz Ansari taking on these roles, or perhaps even make one a woman such as Tina Fey and the other a guy like Jason Sudeikis or Ed Helms. There are a lot of different possibilities that would work and since, hopefully, it would be a comedy it would pay to keep it light with a couple of very funny individuals playing the lead roles. It’s not a stab at Dwayne, it’s just an idea that comedians might be the way to go.
Apart from that is the need for a solid story line that doesn’t involve the spies just going around randomly blowing each other up for one reason or another. That’s the whole gist of the strip in the magazine, but overall it’s a little weak for an ongoing story that needs a plot and a well-rounded formula. Given that it would be a spy movie it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with something that has likely been seen before but still has enough of a comedic lean that it could be both funny and engaging. Obviously the writers are already focused on it and have been for some time as there’s been a good deal of dickering back and forth as to how the movie should be presented, who should be in it, and so on and so forth. The amount of input that can be given in a decade should be enough to get something rolling but obviously this is Hollywood we’re talking about and as such it’s kind of like expecting a miracle to happen overnight, it just doesn’t happen. The idea has to be accepted, tossed around a bit like gem in a tumbler, only for a much longer period of time given that everyone involved is going to want to have their own level of input and everyone is going to think that they have the best idea and intentions when it comes to any given story. That could be why things stall out so badly sometimes, too many people want to direct the course of a story and not enough people are willing to say what they feel and then just sit back and let whatever will happen just happen.
Spy vs. Spy could be a funny movie if it ever gets made and as of now it’s hard to say just when that might be for obvious reasons since until the studios are allowed to open up again the only thing that can be worked on are animated movies, and even those are bound to be slow-going as they’ll have to be done from home if possible and passed along to the next person for each individual part of the project. Making an animated Spy vs. Spy movie might actually be kind of intriguing since it would free up a lot of the content that could be used since these two characters were known to go at each other pretty hard. But a live action movie does appear to be the idea so it will still be fairly interesting to see what those in charge come up with.
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