'This Means War' a trite cliché of a film
Reviewer's Rating: ★1/2
This Means War is more marketing ploy than movie. Maybe the film’s eight producers took a meeting and decided to make the perfect date movie. Their can’t miss moneymaker would seamlessly blend the action, adventure and violence men crave with the romantic comedy women love. And to broaden the film’s appeal even more, why not make it a buddy picture littered with raunchy sexual references?
And so This Means War, from the director of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and producer of TV’s Sorority Forever and Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious, gives us a boneheaded ménage a trois romantic comedy-meets-spy movie that recycles every cliché that could possibly be cut and pasted into a script.
Reese Witherspoon plays Lauren, a young, attractive woman who runs her own products testing company. Of course, despite being young, attractive and an executive who owns a very successful business in Los Angeles, she’s a loser in romance.
In a parallel universe not far away, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy play FDR and Tuck, a pair of federal agents stationed at an CIA field office in L.A. They’re not just fellow secret agents, they’re best buds.
Pine’s FDR is the wacky guy in the team. Hardy’s Tuck is the sensible, down-to-earth guy who rolls his eyes whenever his partner does crazy stuff. It’s that old Mel Gibson-Danny
Glover chemistry. Believe it or not, they’d both take a bullet for each other.
As if two buddies in one buddy picture weren’t enough, Lauren has a buddy, too. Playing her potty mouthed confidante, Trish, Chelsea Handler is the film’s designated girl behaving badly. Frankly, it’s a blotch on the comedian and talk-show host’s résumé.
FDR and Tuck make their entrance in a James Bondian action sequence that disrupts a glamorous party atop a Hong Kong high rise. It’s the first of the film’s chaotic, non-suspenseful action scenes.
The botched Hong Kong operation opens the door for another movie cliché. Angela Bassett co-stars as FDR and Tuck’s perpetually ticked off boss. All law enforcement-set buddy pictures must contain a supervisor whose blood pressure is sent skyrocketing by the buddies’ antics.
The Hong Kong debacle also earns FDR and Tuck an enemy for life. German actor Til Schweiger plays Heinrich, a villain out to revenge his brother’s death. For Heinrich, the only true payback is death for FDR and Tuck.
This Means War only refers to Heinrich’s quest for revenge when it’s convenient. FDR and Tuck wage the movie’s real war against each other. When they both instantly fall for Witherspoon’s Lauren, that loser nobody wanted before, all is fair in love and war, including the unethical deployment of every federal resource at their CIA agent command.
A movie whose prolific badness grows exhausting, This Means War cranks out clichés with such frequency that it easily qualifies as a contender for the most awful film of 2012.