This Means War

Exhaustingly slick from start to finish, This Means War follows CIA agents FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy) as they battle for the affections of a successful woman named Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) – with the film subsequently detailing the former friends’ ongoing efforts at both winning Lauren over and sabotaging the other’s chances with her. It’s a reasonably promising and compelling premise that’s squandered from the word go by director McG, as the filmmaker, working from a script by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg, has infused the proceedings with a relentlessly one-dimensional feel that grows more and more wearying as time progresses. This is despite affable performances from the film’s three stars, with Pine and Hardy’s charismatic work initially compensating for the stale atmosphere but eventually rendered moot by McG’s pervasively incompetent sensibilities. And while there are a few amusing bits here and there, This Means War is, for the most part, dominated by sequences of an unreasonably stupid variety (eg a hopelessly broad interlude in which Hardy’s Tuck, in an effort at proving his masculinity to Lauren, destroys his fellow competitors during a friendly paintball match). It is, as such, not surprising to note that the movie, perhaps inevitably, transforms into an increasingly interminable experience as it passes the one-hour mark, with the aggressively tedious, action-packed finale ensuring that the whole thing concludes on as underwhelming and anticlimactic a note as one could possibly envision – which effectively (and ultimately) cements This Means War‘s place as a seriously wrongheaded endeavor from an almost impressively inept filmmaker.

*1/2 out of ****