TOTALLY SPIES!: THE MOVIE (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One year before Disney issued its "high school spy-girl" TV series KIM POSSIBLE, Television Francaise got there first with the antic adventures of Alex, Sam and Clover in TOTALLY SPIES. When the French series reached American shores in translated form, it enjoyed a good measure of popularity. Allegedly the show still may come out with more episodes, but in 2009 the studio released this movie, which serves as something of an origin for the comic spy-girls.

The three teen girls don't know each other as they're due to enter their freshman years at a Beverly Hills high school. However, they just happen to cross paths in a shopping mall when the super-secret agency WOOHP decides that the three untrained teens need to have their superspy potential tested. Without even intending to audition, Sam, Clover and Alex pass the test, which involves the girls having to "log roll" atop a colossal sushi roll.

WOOHP commander Jerry Lewis, an older balding man, strongarms the teens into accepting membership in the agency, which includes their getting trained in martial arts and donning colorful spandex uniforms. Jerry alludes to a mission involving "mysterious disappearances," but the script spends over half an hour acclimatizing the young women to their double life as superspies and as high school freshmen. The good girls have their first run-in with "mean girl" Mandy, their continuing school nemesis from the series. The heroines also meet a domineering principal, Mrs. Skritch, who harasses the girls but must be written out at the movie's end because she's not in the series proper. (Skritch does contribute to one of the few funny high-school jokes, when the girls avoid her while dancing to "Walk Like an Egyptian.") 

Finally the main plot gets going, and it concerns a mysterious mastermind who is brainwashing young people with a device called "the Fabulizer." The spy girls track their enemy to his orbiting space station and learn that the evildoer is failed fashion-model Fabu, who plans to eliminate most of Earth's population to promote his "fashion paradise" of brainwashed subjects. The girls get initially trounced by Fabu's henchman Yuri and captured. A male WOOHP agent also sneaks aboard the satellite, but he's willing to let the girls go hang so that he can get the credit for taking down the mastermind. However, in a surprising development, wimpy looking Fabu outfights the WOOHP agent. However, the teen spies break free, clobber both Yuri and Fabu, and save the world before returning to their usual school routine.

I grade the mythicity in SPIES "fair" just because the writers keep the silly situations focused on the fads of 21st-century youth culture. A fair number of jokes land, and the animation is colorful and lively given its TV-level origins, so SPIES is worth a look if one is in the mood for this sort of farce.