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

The Dark Knight Rises Casting

If it has not already been drawn to your attention, it was announced today that Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy have been cast as Catwoman and Bane in Christopher Nolan’s third Bat-film,The Dark Knight Rises. Whilst it is a little early to gauge a prevailing popular opinion on this news, allow me to offer my two cents on the matter.

It seems clear to me that a great deal of the point of The Dark Knight was to set up The Joker as the proposed trilogy’s final villain – as the late, great Heath Ledger taunts Christian Bale’s Batman at that film’s conclusion, ‘I think you and I are destined to do this forever’. Unfortunately, sad real life events put a stop to any further outings for The Joker in Nolan’s saga. Also unfortunate (but to a far lesser degree), was the decision to kill off Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, who would have served as an excellent third film villain in Ledger’s absence. These two deaths, both fictional and real, have forced Nolan to enlist new villains for the inevitable third film.

Of course, the watch-word for Nolan’s series thus far has been realism, or at least something approaching it, which rules out a great deal of Batman’s rogues gallery (Killer Croc, for example). There were also rumours regarding an admirable ambition on the scriptwriter’s behalf of a reluctance to utilise villains that had appeared in Batman films before (though that clearly hasn’t materialised). As such, Catwoman seems like a reasonable choice, though Bane perhaps less so.

Like Batman, Catwoman traditionally is a superpower-less character (barring a vague ‘nine-lives’ power in some iterations), who operates as a thief, so that fits into Nolan’s world relatively nicely. Hathaway seems like a reasonable choice for the role and the tone of the previous Nolan Batman films suggests that The Dark Knight Rises would bridge the gap between her more mature roles (in films such as Brokeback Mountain and Rachel Getting Married) and her more family-friendly fare (The Princess Diaries, Get Smart, Bride Wars). The woman has decent range and so long as her part is written well, she could well be exemplary in the role. It would be interesting (though perhaps ill-advised) if Nolan were to tackle the romantic angle between Batman and Catwoman, though probably unlikely given Bruce Wayne’s devastation at the death of Rachel Dawes in the previous film.

Bane, on the other hand is a more risky choice. Traditionally portrayed as a magic potion enhanced super soldier, he may have to be adapted to fit into Nolan’s world, perhaps as a steroid freak? His major contribution to Bat-lore would be breaking the Caped Crusader’s spine back in the early nineties. Whilst that was a thrilling arc in the comics, it is hard to imagine how it would be written into what is presumably the final instalment in Nolan’s saga, without leaving an awful lot of loose ends or making for an awfully rushed film. Hardy, however, is an extremely promising actor and his turn in Bronson as a semi-psychotic hard arse would suggest he could suit the role.

If the previous two films (and his other work) have taught us anything, it’s that Nolan has more than earned our trust with the Batman franchise, having not put a foot wrong thus far. Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow is still potentially in the mix, so we should not rule out an appearance from him. If there has been one positive from Ledger’s death, it would be the fact that his excellent performance in The Dark Knight has forced any other actors entering the franchise to really raise their game. If Hathaway and Hardy comply, then I’m sure they’ll shine in The Dark Knight Rises.