And it’s probably the last time we’ll ever see Murray in full goofball mode, smiling, doing pratfalls, playing a happy idiot, not a brooding know-it-all.

Murray has always played cool and above-it-all, but here he leans full-tilt boogie into square silliness, throwing himself into ludicrous misunderstandings and energetic slapstick. Murray plays a dense Iowan everyman who winds up mistaken for a cunning secret agent by Russian intelligence, and he spends the majority of the film unaware that his life is in danger. They didn’t see this spy comedy either, which is also a shame. No one, wisely, saw the wan elephant comedy Larger Than Life, nor, tragically, did they turn out to watch him, and his hair, steal the Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin. Anderson also saved a career that, by the late ’90s, was in trouble. When Wes Anderson cast the deadpan comedy god as Herman Blume, a depressed Texan industrialist competing for the affections of a private school teacher with a 15-year-old boy, he unlocked the man’s deep, melancholic side, which had always been there but rarely been so visible. You can separate Bill Murray’s career into two halves: There’s before he made Rushmore and there’s after. As we wait a bit longer for the next Bond film, No Time to Die, now due in November, let’s put up our feet and take a look back at a genre that dares laugh at stuff that, in the real world, could end with us all killed. There are many kinds of spy comedies: they can be parodies, they can be satires. But spy movies mostly play it straight, and as a result, there are plenty of spy comedies to make fun of them. How realistic is James Bond? Does any pencil-pushing agent get to ever leave cramped rooms, let alone jump on moving airplanes like Ethan Hunt? Even George Smiley, hero of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, leads a more exciting life than anyone in British intelligence. Spy movies already tend to be at least a little silly.

Movies with spy agent micheal astin