This Means War Review

The improbably named Tuck and FDR are top CIA spies and best friends who fall for the same woman, with zany consequences! Well ‘zany consequences’ were the intention anyway. The actual consequences are tedium, annoyance and great swathes of mirthless drivel.

To be fair, improbable names aren’t surprising when your film is directed by a man known as ‘McG’ and by the same token, the bizarre monikers of your protagonists are also the least of your concerns. The ingredients are reasonably promising; you’ve got a decent trio of lead actors in Tom Hardy, Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine (though he perhaps isn’t as decent as the other two), a simple plot which shouldn’t be too difficult to mess up and loads of money to throw at the screen. Heck, you’ve even got Will Smith as a producer. Who wouldn’t want the Fresh Prince of Bel Air helping you out with your film?

Unfortunately, that’s about the best that can be said the film. It’s not that it’s outrageously and objectively excruciating, just really irritating and, crucially, very unfunny. I laughed once during the whole ninety-eight minutes (hey, at least it’s fairly brief). For what is supposed to be a comedy, that’s really not good enough. The unfunniness, to coin a term, is kind of rooted in the central premise. Having two secret agents using the full range surveillance equipment and invasions of privacy allowed by the Patriot Act to spy on a woman in order to gain more information about her interests in order to boff her first and also to scupper the other’s attempts to woo her stops being a faintly amusing plot device almost immediately and simply becomes incredibly creepy. While I’m at it, using the torture of a suspect and military drones[1] as sources of comedy is spectacularly ill-judged and in extremely poor taste. Would the film get away with these things if it was being satirical?Possibly. Unfortunately that’s not an angle that the filmmakers opted to explore.

You might argue that I shouldn’t be taking a frothy rom-com quite so seriously. Fair point. I would counter with the assertion that perhaps if there had been a few more laughs in the script, I wouldn’t have dwelt on these matters. Instead, I dwelt on how ignorant and insensitive the film was, how lunkheaded, trite and painfully predictable. I dwelt on all of these problems with the film and focussed my annoyance on four major factors of rubbishness: its poor taste, the fact that I highly doubt that an Englishman could work for the CIA, the character’s stupid names (seriously, what British person has ever been called ‘Tuck’ since that Friar that Robin Hood used to hang out with?) and Chris Pine’s freakishly large cranium. Check out the poster. It’s massive. Other than my obligation to write this review, the only reason I would have stayed in the cinema otherwise would have been to satisfy my curiosity as to whether or not Pine’s enormous skull would topple off his shoulders like an errant scoop of ice cream from a cone. Unfortunately it did not.
__________

[1] Which, lest we forget, are responsible for the deaths of an estimated 392 civilians, including 175 children in attacks in 2004 alone.