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This Means War

This Means War is precisely the kind of movie I might indiscriminatingly sit through while sprawled out on the couch, were I to flip to it right when Reese Witherspoon shows off her Wonderbra. Apart from that and maybe one or two fleeting moments of humour, there’s not much here to rationalize the time, trouble and cost of a trip to the theatre. Or waste a moment of your Netflix subscription on, for that matter.
 
The plot should be familiar if you’ve seen any recent slate of trailers. Tuck (Tom Hardy) and FDR (Chris Pine, saddled with one of the worst character names ever) are roguish CIA agents and close friends who make an enemy out of standard issue bad guy Heinrich (Til Schweiger) after killing his brother. That’s in the first few minutes.
 
The bulk of the movie, however, is devoted to the contest between the two men for the affections of Lauren (Witherspoon), a thirtysomething single woman who meets Tuck through a dating site, and whom FDR also randomly meets and charms. Neither man at first knows the other is dating Lauren – and when they do find out, their rivalry mounts as their friendship dissolves. Heinrich, however, hasn’t forgotten them.
 
All this might have been fun enough; in some respects it made me recall True Lies (1994), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played a superspy who’d never told his wife what he really does for a living. As directed by James Cameron, the movie was a mostly entertaining mix of deliberately over-the-top action and bumbling romantic comedy.
 
This time, all the gunplay and explosions are uninspired and purely mechanical, with the "comedy" consisting of, for example, painfully lame wordplay on the subject of grills, in one scene. Lauren’s a product tester, you see, and FDR crashes one consumer feedback session to boldly ask her out in front of everyone. He leads up to it, though, with multiple gems of witticism, such as his admission that he loves grills, but this one is "not very user-friendly."
 
"Depends on the user," Lauren shoots back.
 
Doesn’t that just make you want to reach into your wallet for $10.25?
 
What the studios need to realize is, the days are over when they can get away with just not trying. This Means War is Hollywood entertainment at just about its disposable worst.