This Means War – Review

7th March 2012

I can sum up my review of this movie fairly quickly: This Means War fucking rocks. Now let me qualify that statement.

This Means War sounds on paper like your average rom-com-action flick – Tom Hardy and Chris Pine play CIA agents, Tuck and FDR, who kick ass fighting international ‘bad guys’ (they’re always German or Russian in these movies aren’t they?) who both end up dating the same woman, Reese Witherspoon’s Lauren. What follows is a spiral into games of espionage against each other in order to see which one gets the girl. This movie is directed by McG, a man whose cinematic output is almost consistently awful – with the exception of Charlie’s Angels which is so awful it has swung back around and is actually good again.

That being said, This Means War is great entertainment and hilarious to boot. The story is more about the bro-mance between the two male leads than it is about their respective romances with Reese Witherspoon. The pranks played by Tuck and FDR in attempts to sabotage each other’s progress with Lauren have hilarious consequences and show a comical misuse of CIA resources. The spy element to the plot is very much just a vehicle to support the escalating competition between the two and really only shows up as ‘day job’ filler and to spark the predictable third act climax. It’s fast paced and doesn’t loose your attention at any point. The action is fun, fairly constant, and for a McG movie not over the top or completely ridiculous. In fact I didn’t realise this was a McG movie until his name came up at the end.

A vast majority of the laughs go to the gloriously slutty, married, but vaguely cougar-ish Trish played by notorious author and stand up comedian Chelsea Handler. Few people can really carry off the line “and guys will really go for that camel toe” as an off the cuff compliment, but she does it marvellously. Reese Witherspoon, for her part, looks fantastic in this film – I’m assuming there’s some L.A. secret about sacrificing babies that keeps everyone looking so young. But the show obviously goes to Tom Hardy and Chris Pine who didn’t simply phone this one in in-between filming the slightly more serious (but infinitely more likely to induce geeks to orgasm) big budget movie sequels The Dark Knight Rises and Star Trek 2. Hardy is definitely the better actor (see Bronson, Inception, or Warrior) but since Pine’s role is not too far removed from his Star Trek role of James T. Kirk he is well within his comfort zone.

This isn’t ‘a great work of cinema’, it’s one of those fun, glossy, light pieces of entertainment. It’s a buddy movie with some laughs, some explosions, and a soft underbelly of romance. Don’t go into this movie looking to be intellectually stimulated or moved to tears by the raw power of emotion, just go for an amusing, easy way to spend approximately two hours and you won’t be disappointed.

7 out of 10 – Fun and frivolous.

This Means War is in cinemas now.

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