Lazy, charmless and sexist action rom-com is little style and no substance.
McG – a ridiculously ghetto moniker for middle-aged white director Joseph McGinty Nichol – firmly established his style with Charlie’s Angels and his work on Chuck: insubstantial fluff with a lot of deafeningly loud BANGs thrown in to keep you awake. Which is not always automatically a bad thing, but is very rarely a great thing. So it’s nice to see that McG has really pushed himself here. For This Means War is a goddawful thing.
But at the very (very) least, This Means War is a goddawful thing that teaches us an important lesson: it doesn’t matter if you’re the hottest new actor in Hollywood (Tom Hardy), or if you have an Oscar (Reese Witherspoon), or just have perfectly shaped eyebrows (Chris Pine); there’s no pay-cheque too big that you won’t abandon your dignity and self-respect to turn tricks for misogynist Hollywood executives. So: Just say yes, kids! Train hard, become a good actor (or bad actor with a talented plastic surgeon/eyebrow waxer), and one day, you too can slide into bed with a bad combination of She’s All That, Charlie’s Angels and Get Smart and screw your now-useless brains out.
When pretty CIA agents Pine and Hardy both fall for Witherspoon’s pretty consumer-focus-group-reviewer-something-or-other, bets are made, testosterone-fuelled attempts to one-up each other ensue, Chelsea Handler tries to be funny, the romantic climax sees a woman responding to the human equivalent of a dog-calling contest, and the world rotates backwards on its axis.
It’s not just the chauvinism, the phoned-in performances or the chemistry-free triangle that grates. After all, it’s an action comedy rom-com and these things, while tiresome, are generally to be expected. It’s the fact that it’s incredibly lazy, and laughably sloppy. Not only are the action sequences badly-paced with awful effects, but if you based a drinking game on the amount of times the crew are visible in the reflection of big cars, you’d be unconscious by half-time.
Which would be a blessing. This Means War is stupid, misjudged, charmless and dull. It will make millions. War won, Hollywood. I give up.