This Means War

The film is as dull as this poster.

This movie suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

I don't usually put things that bluntly. I mean, I gave Transformers 3 and freaking Immortals a fair treatment, but this film was just so bad. I went in knowing it would suck ("you gotta see one shitty movie a year to appreciate the good ones" was my mantra that day), only to be thoroughly surprised by the depths of suckitude contained within.

This Means War is a romantic comedy/action film about two CIA agents who are grounded after they fail a mission. To pass off the time, they decide to get back into dating, and accidentally both hit it off with the same girl. They decide to let her choose which one to keep, but slowly start to utilise their CIA equipment and resources to spy on her and sabotage each others' dates.

It's basically "True Lies meets There's Something About Mary". Except without the fantastic action of the former and the genuine amusement of the latter.

The three lead characters are played by Chris Pine (as the slick, super-arrogant ladies man), Tom Hardy (as the safer divorcee) and Reese Witherspoon (as a love interest whose only real personality is her wacky job and even wackier best friend). All of them at least try, but none are given good enough material to make their characters likeable. The guys come off as creepy and obsessed, and never get punished for probably wasting millions of dollars on their childish antics, and the girl only exists to present new challenges for them to overcome.

The script is annoying and really bad. There are "running gags" which only happen twice in the whole movie, and thus make no freaking sense and are not funny. The different "romantic" scenarios are badly planned and make little to no sense. The subplot with a vengeful gangster trying to get revenge of the CIA agents is so thin it might as well not exist. What's more, the film is really badly paced, with an over-reliance on montages to pad itself out.

The action is badly shot, and it's hard to tell what's happening a lot of the time. None of the chase scenes or shootouts are memorable at all. The few jokes that could have been good are all shown in the trailer. The cinematography is bad. The music is forgettable, other than the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" when the guys are ruining each others' dates (GET IT?). The resolution at the end is so predictable and unimaginative, it's bad even by romantic comedy standards. It's just an all-around bad movie...

And I had a blast watching it. Me and my friends were laughing so hard at how bad this was, and at how most of the audience seemed to eat it up (or maybe they were being as ironic as we were). We had a great time in the cinema, that day, but the movie is still shit, plain and simple.