Steer clear of this awful movie
Film review: This Means War
Rating: *
Another week, another film column, another sub-standard rom-com apparently sent to test me.
This time a dose of action has been added to the romantic-comedy mix, with Chris Pine and Tom Hardy starring as two super-slick CIA agents desperate to win the hand of a flighty Reese Witherspoon (employing the many tools of their trade in the process).
However, far from livening up this most neglected of genres, the combination of romance and action turns the whole thing into a bit of a mess. While the romantic scenes are uninteresting and unsexy (Witherspoon giving us nothing short of a masterclass in these areas), the action scenes are left feeling interminably boorish and blokey. In fact the whole film strikes me as the sort of thing a cynical studio executive might pitch to a focus group, the ideal “date movie” with something for both guys and gals.
Lurking behind all this, like a sinister criminal mastermind with a shadowy alias, is ‘McG’ (real name Joseph McGinty Nichol), whose past directing efforts have included Charlie’s Angels, Terminator: Salvation, and, rather tellingly, an extensive portfolio of adverts and music videos. A damning charge sheet by anyone’s standards, but This Means War surely represents a new low. Not only does McG fail to make his story romantic or funny, but he also makes a number of bizarre directorial decisions that raise some fundamental questions about his judgment. In one scene, for example, Pine and Hardy interrogate a man in an orange jumpsuit by threatening to cut off his fingers with a set of pliers. It’s such a weird scene, and the allusions to Guantanamo so ham-fisted, one really doesn’t know how to react. Other throwaway jokes about being “a spaz”, and not liking British men, met with similar feelings of awkwardness from the audience at my screening.
Still, I don’t wish to be too harsh on McG. This is partly because I think his career is starting to resemble an extended case of Hanlon’s Razor (namely, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity). More importantly though, I want to save my final piece of criticism for Chelsea Handler, who plays Witherspoon’s acid-tongued female confidante. Handler’s aging, dyspeptic caricature is like every “outrageous” supporting character from every second-rate US sitcom you’ve ever seen, rolled into one quite alarmingly unfunny figure.
Sadly there isn’t room in the remaining centimetres of this column to express the full horror of Handler’s performance so, for those without the ghoulish desire to witness it for themselves, I suggest giving her, and this stupid, incompetent comedy, a very wide berth.