This Means War: Cross-Genre Disaster

Released on Valentine's Day, This Means Waraimed to be the perfect date film: enough Rom-Com for her, enough action movie violence for him. With strong lead actors and the proven cross-genre direction of McG, I felt genuinely intrigued by its potential.

Then, ten minutes in, I felt dumb. Real dumb.

Often we try not to discuss films as a product, despite acknowledging we work in "The Industry." No one wants such reductive titles to steal the intent (or at least perception) of artistic purpose. But each frame of This Means War betrays such formulaic, trite, pandering, limpness… It might as well shout: "We wanted to get your money and now we have it, so who gives a crap?" It also manages to stick to an incredibly rigid structure while also flailing wildly between tones, and squanders a few of the better actors in modern cinema. And perhaps that hurts worst of all. There was such potential here, crushed so completely that I felt sorry for all parties involved.

It's not the worst romantic comedy of all time, but maybe it didn't even want to dabble in the genre.

This Means Warintroduces us to FDR Foster (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), two CIA agents and super-best-friends. When they're not ruthlessly murdering drug dealers, they're hanging out and watching sitcom marathons on TV. FDR is the party animal swinger, and Tuck is a divorced dad who feels pangs of loneliness. Through a mix-up in scheduling and online dating, they both wind up falling for Lauren Scott (Reese Witherspoon), a workaholic from the consumer products testing field. When the boys put this together, they agree to keep pursuing the relationship, and to let the lady decide. As she drags them along further, prompted by her best friend (Chelsea Handler), they begin to use CIA resources to research, investigate, and impress Lauren on their dates. Of course, this diversion of attention allows the terrorist who wants them dead to sneak into their lives, and they're forced to put petty squabbles aside to save the girl, and each other.

Nothing new here. Not like there needs to be in a RomCom, but still, a fair premise with opportunities. In the execution, it just falls apart on every level.

Pine and Hardy abandon every iota of my interest, by playing a game of "Like Me More" with the audience from start to finish. It never feels like they care about the girl, as much as they care about me leaving the theater and knowing which one I would select. The need of it is so overwhelming that all notions of "romance" fail to connect. For a movie that feels like it passed through dozens of re-write hands over the years, it's amazing how few jokes there are. The couple next to me only laughed when Tom Hardy got shot in the balls with a paintball gun. In a movie that allows, and even encourages, the exploration of complex socio-political issues in ridiculous ways, it's sad the highest point they could reach for the comedy was "Jack-Assian."

Conversely, Witherspoon and Handler seem to daring the audience to hate them. The petty problems of their perfect lives (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are both in love with you? Oh noes!) are made worse by mixing speeches about women's empowerment with blatantly awful choices, and occasionally devolving into sheer nonsense. Handler has a couple of lines which I'm convinced made no sense whatsoever, but she delivered them fast enough that the audience couldn't ask questions. Not that the audience isn't chalk-full of excellent questions already, like why does the villain appear at such odd intervals and why are we still willing to believe in 2012 that adorable quirkster Witherspoon is depressingly single?

My excitement had been based in seeing McG try new ideas for the action genre in this RomCom for everyone. While a few of the sequences are entertaining (never dazzling or impressive), they lack a sense of reasonable scale. Our opening scene shows the agents killing dozens of bad-guys at a foreign hotel rooftop, with the main villain escaping via parachute. Throughout the rest of the film, nothing touches near this. A few shots fired in a bar, a game of paint ball, and final car chase where the main baddie is rendered so invisible, it feels a shame to have named him at all. The opening sequence, again, sets a high bar: smart fighting movies, clever knockouts, and a point of invested emotional interest. They're placed unevenly, and the characters carry little consistency. There's more action in a single episode of Chuck, and more ideas worth talking about.

Finally, even disregarding situations that portray major characters as bizarre racial/cultural stereotypes, there's a very real sense this movie sat on a shelf for a few years. Major plot points rotate around elements of living that no longer apply. Characters watch TV marathons, live. Or rent videos from a VIDEO STORE? Those don't exist. Online dating seems new and crazy, so much so that Tom Hardy, a CIA Agent, puts all of his real, personal data online. For all of us. And Hardy even claims to work as a travel agent. His ex-wife wants to know why he's the only travel agent she ever met who actually has to travel. Shouldn't she be asking what a travel agent does and where he works, now that we're out of the Aughts.

It's not the worst movie, but it is the worst movie I forsee these actors being a part of. Pine will rock Star Trek and Hardy has to go kill Batman… I like to think they were tricked. Like, the draft they read back on signing was clever and then just got noted out of existence. They're excellent leads and pretty to look at, but the journey of their arcs collide at the worst moments, or are suddenly swept under the rug with no motivation. The boys jump from wanting to murder each other, straight to the aforementioned neediness, to comically exaggerated bromance, all over visceral violence that sobers the room up quickly.

It's a bizarre attempt to do something new by rehashing everything the studio wants to pretend has the physical consistency of "safe". The result is unlovable, unwatchable, and uninteresting. This Means Suck.