The thing about This Means War is that it should have been the perfect date movie. The story of two rival government operatives (Tom Hardy & Chris Pine) competing over the same woman (Reese Witherspoon) has a little something for everyone. For the guys in the audience you’ve got the spy games, which add a kinetic thrill to all the relationship talk. For the ladies you have the romantic element to take the bad taste of all the macho posturing that comes with the action scenarios out of their mouths. And the comedic slant that everything is presented with, heck, that appeals to everyone. Yes, This Means War has so much wide spread appeal that it almost seems like it was created by committee. Or, actually, maybe it was made by committee, and maybe that’s why it’s so miserably bad.
The overarching problem that sabotages every aspect of this film from top to bottom is that every second you’re watching it you’re aware that this was a product that the people involved were paid to make and not a story that anyone was excited to tell. McG is a director that I’ve generally always disliked. He seems to be more focused on spectacle than he is character or story, but he’s not good enough at creating spectacle to make that remotely worthwhile. But the thing is, his stuff is generally too dumb and disposable to react to it very strongly, so he kind of gets a pass from the public. And here we’re dealing with the same sort of thing. Sure, This Means War is unsuccessful and incompetent at every level, but it’s just a stupid romantic comedy, and it’s never so bad that it’s infuriating, so who really cares? Turns out, not the director, not the actors, and certainly not me.
First off, let’s talk about the action element. It doesn’t work for several reasons. Of course, there’s the typical for McG reason that the man just doesn’t know how to construct, shoot, and edit an action scene, so every time someone tries to run, jump, fight, shoot, or what have you, it just comes off as choppy and incoherent. The camera never stops moving, the edits never stop coming, and it only takes about two minutes for the whole thing to become visually tiresome. But the action also doesn’t work because it just doesn’t get enough focus to mean anything. There’s a mini-subplot about a dangerous criminal who is coming after our protagonists because they caused the death of his brother, but it’s completely boring, it’s relegated to the background, and whenever it pops up it just feels like it’s taking away from the romantic plot that gets the bulk of the focus. Plus, its inclusion made things painfully obvious that the third act was going to degenerate into a stupid chase scene where the characters would have to deal with surviving instead of the destructive consequences of the lies and infidelities they perpetrated in their interpersonal relationships.
Which I guess brings us to the romantic element. It doesn’t work because these characters are all just so miserably gross and unlikable that you don’t want to see any of them end up happy. It’s not just that these two knuckleheads are agreeing to compete over a woman as if she were some sort of sports trophy. That’s creepy enough on its own, but it’s typical romantic comedy nonsense, and to be expected. No, the real grossness of this film comes in the way these guys play out the competition. They use government resources, they divert attention from anti-terrorist concerns to focus on their love lives, they bug the girl’s apartment, they stalk and spy on each other. There’s actually a scene where Pine’s character just says “patriot act” to justify using surveillance equipment to document somebody’s most intimate moments, and it’s treated like a light gag. Sickening. And this girl, she’s got no problem juggling two guys at once, leading both of them to believe that she’s serious about having a monogamous relationship, sleeping with them, meeting their families... yet when she finds out that they’ve actually known each other all along she has the nerve to pull the “I trusted you!” card. Can you believe that we’re supposed to become invested in all of this inane duplicity? People be tripping.
The action and romantic elements look like the work of a skilled genius when compared to the comedy, however. This movie is so uncomfortably unfunny that I found myself audibly groaning every five minutes or so at the lameness of a gag, or the stupidity of a situation. As soon as we meet the two agents and see what they do we get a scene where they’re chewed out for being reckless by their always screaming commander; and with none of the self aware parody of films like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 or Last Action Hero. This wasn’t included for fun, it was just hackneyed and obvious because the lazy screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to come up with any situations that weren’t well tread and easy. We’re treated to a scene involving a grill where Witherspoon and Pine trade grill-related sex puns that could have come out of a joke book from the 40s. We sit through multiple scenes of characters sneaking around in the same space, unaware of each other, like a big budget episode of Three’s Company. And, once again, none of it comes off as self-aware or playful. Instead what we’re watching just plays as out of touch attempts at humor that would have been more at home at a Dental Convention Talent Show (not that I’m an antidentite).
It’s almost fruitless to talk about how the acting is, because none of the members of the cast are given anything worth doing. And that’s especially a shame here, because the three principals are all very talented performers (to varying degrees). Witherspoon’s Lauren is nothing more than a generic dream girl; cute, successful, and fun, but without any unique or discerning personality traits whatsoever. This is the sort of role that she could sleepwalk through, and generally that’s what she seems to do. She isn’t good, nor bad, but mostly she just seems disinterested. And who can blame her when it feels like she’s already regurgitated this material time and time again?
Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are both fine actors and charismatic to boot, but they’re a little mismatched here. Pine has some charm, he has some presence, I totally bought him filling the shoes of William Shatner and taking charge of the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek; but he just doesn’t have what it takes to stand next to Tom Hardy. Hardy is a once in a generation talent, a concentrated adrenaline shot of star power, and it was absolutely inconceivable that Pine was going to go toe-to-toe with him here and come out looking like anything other than a second banana. Joel Edgerton shocked me by refusing to wither in Hardy’s presence in Warrior, but here things just don’t work out. Pine is scrambling, working double time to try and keep up with the intrigue that just naturally oozes from Hardy’s pores, and he ends up coming off as desperate and cloying, like a big screen version of Tom Haverford (and I’m not talking about the scene where he does actually try to play the big shot regular at a posh nightclub, there he came off more like Jim Carrey in The Mask).
Before we wrap up the acting portion of this review, special mention has to be given to Chelsea Handler. While the rest of the members of this cast are good actors slumming it with bad material, Handler is actively, wretchedly bad as Witherspoon’s sassy best friend. She is given mouthfuls upon mouthfuls of dialogue, and she isn’t able to make any of it sound natural. She’s dead in the eyes, not engaging with Witherspoon on any human level, and she delivers her lines with the rapid-fire, sardonic rhythm of a standup comedy routine, never at any moment trying to recreate the natural cadence of two people having a conversation. She’s showing up to do schtick, to work in her routine, and she stands out like a sore thumb whenever she’s on screen. Forget any chemistry between her and the other actors, Handler and the rest of this film don’t even feel like they exist in the same universe, and I can’t figure out how the decision to include her could have possibly came about (*cough*studionotes*cough*).
If you want to end things on a nice, meditative note, all of the reasons this film doesn’t work can be summed up pretty well by the way it chooses to end. The whole film builds up the choice—Hardy or Pine, Pine or Hardy—and all of the tension is supposedly supposed to come from the fact that one of them will be chosen and the other will be heartbroken. But, of course, this is a film that was built by committee and rigorously sculpted through focus groups, so there needed to be an easy out happy ending for everybody. Well, there is, and it’s the one that you’re going to see coming a mile away. The obviousness isn’t why it’s so awful though. It’s awful because of the way it happens, and the way it needlessly paints one of the side characters as being horrendously shallow and painfully irresponsible. The guy who doesn’t find love with Witherspoon, he gets a consolation prize alright, but the film just expects us to ignore the fact that the person he ends up with is an awful, awful woman. I’ll give this one a small bit of credit because Hardy is fun to watch at times, but, other than that, This Means War is a tedious movie that’s silly and immoral, yet still manages to somehow be joyless. Good grief.
