This Means a Bore : The Hawk Eye

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What's Your Rating of This Means War?

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Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

Aleks Kochan, A&E Editor
February 27, 2012
Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Movies

Hollywood has fallen prey to an ill-advised trend of spicing up romantic comedies with a dose of?secret agent action. The problem is the romantic plot ends up undeveloped and the stunts are far weaker than those in specialized action movies. After critically panned flicks like Killers and Night and Day, you would hope filmmakers had learned their lesson. Unfortunately, This Means War is just another attempt to draw in a female audience with hunky man candy and keep their boyfriends distracted with explosions.

Chris Pine and Tom Hardy fill their cliche dress?shoes perfectly as super spies and best buddies FDR and Tuck. Pine portrays playboy FDR with a perfect bachelor lifestyle and an inexplicable presidential nickname while Hardy plays a British divorcee and father of one. His son?s character may have been the most poorly employed performance in the movie. The boy should have been endearing, but he was just one of many plots to play on our heartstrings that fell totally flat. Reese Witherspoon?s character was so shallow she didn?t even fill out a cliche. There was a half-hearted attempt to make her a?fastidiously OCD old maid, but the effect is ruined by Chelsea Handler in the guise of her trashy, sex-crazed best friend.

Chelsea Handler?s character, Trish, is supposed to keep us entertained during the beginning of the movie, or at least I assumed so because I saw so few other attempts at humor. She has a reputation for crude comedy, and she continued to earn that reputation with every gag the censors let through her lips. While some of her quips and quirks were funny, many just left me wincing at the cheap attempts to get a laugh. Handler?s crass humor and the rival agents? attempts to woo Witherspoon with unbelievably over-the-top romantic gestures failed to melt my heart or keep me amused, and the movie took far too long to really get going.

The?highly advertised and poorly executed concept?of the movie is that?both agents?begin dating and eventually fall in love with one Lauren Scott (Witherspoon) and?start a series of?zany spy?hijinxes to bump each?other out of the dating scene. The amount of coincidence and friendly backstabbing was absolutely incredible, unlike?the action which?was disappointing even after I saw how bad the rest of the movie was shaping up to be. I was bored before the spies even started interfering with each other?s date nights. In a movie that has no chance at being meaningful, such poor pacing is an issue. In a gimmick-based flick, the gimmicks must come faster. After watching the trailer, there weren?t any climactic scenes of which?I hadn?t already seen a portion, and I found myself constantly waiting for the action to pick up or for some surprising new gag to work its way into the film. Neither came to pass.

I was unable to embed the trailer in this article because I was unable to find a cut of the trailer that wasn?t explicit. The movie didn?t deserve an R rating, but its PG-13 rating was appropriate and well-deserved. Keep in mind that all of the humor will be scatalogical, anatomical, or profane, and the movie is ripe with sexual themes and innuendoes. Violence was also a factor when rating the movie, but you don?t need to be worried about intense or frightening scenes. The stunts were by far one of the most boring elements of the movie, second only to Reese Witherspoon.

If you have issues with crude humor or poor filmmaking, don?t see this movie. Go see it if you?re content with juvenile humor, mature language, and dull stunts pushing along a dead plot, or like I did, because everything else is sold out. The empty theater spoke volumes.?I expected to leave the movies underwhelmed. I ended up surprised by how much more disappointing the movie could turn out to be than my worst fears.

Source: http://www.hawkeyenewsonline.com/arts-entertainment/2012/02/27/this-means-a-bore/

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