Director Paul Feig and comedian Melissa McCarthy team up to take down another genre with mixed results in “Spy.”

In the summer of 2011, Feig and McCarthy were able to take on superheroes and pirates at the box office and deliver one of the year’s biggest surprises in “Bridesmaids.” The film, starring Kristen Wiig, earned praise for being a well written and directed female-driven comedy. After the success of that film, Feig and McCarthy decided to take on the buddy cop genre in the average 2013 comedy “The Heat.”

Teaming up for a third team in four years, the duo decides to poke fun at the spy genre in their appropriately titled “Spy.” McCarthy stars as Susan Cooper, one of the top CIA analysts and partner to Jude Law’s character, Bradley Fine. When Fine drops off the grid and most of the agency’s top agents are compromised, Cooper volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate a deadly arms dealer (played by Rose Byrne).

One of the main problems I have with Feig and McCarthy films is that although they are certainly funny, I can never get the sense of whether they are making fun of the genre or just simply playing by its rules. “The Heat” used a lot of common buddy cop plot beats in a really predictable fashion, and it happens again this time around in “Spy.”

Everything that happens in the 117 minute runtime has been seen before in countless other spy movies, but instead of making fun of it in a parody kind of way, the film just kind of lets things happen. Instead of the gags and comedy beats poking fun at the genre, they are just R-rated shenanigans that although at times very funny, are not unique to the spy genre.

McCarthy is obviously the huge draw here, and although she does get a number of very big laughs, it is her co-stars who normally are not in comedies that get the laughs. Jason Statham plays the tough and bone-headed Rick Ford and he gets a lot of the film’s biggest laughs. The reason I liked his character so much was that almost every line he said was over the top and yet still something a rigid CIA agent would say in a spy movie; I wish the film had more of that.

Overall, “Spy” is certainly a very entertaining and mostly funny action-comedy. Feig and McCarthy know how to pack a lot of R-rated humor into their films, I just wish they would offer something that was smarter rather than just going for laughs. Maybe they can do that in their next inevitable genre comedy team up.

GRADE: B-