Mar 5, 2012

This Means War - Unamusing Romantic Comedy

AFTER ‘LEGALLY BLONDE’ (2001) and “Sweet Home Alabama” (2002) Reese Witherspoon hasn’t done any new comedy that is as endearing. She may have won the Oscar for “Walk the Line” in 2005, but her other films failed to make waves like “Vanity Fair”, “Just Like Heaven”, “Legally Blonde 2”, “Rendition”, “Penelope” and “Water for Elephants”. Now comes “This Means War”, basically a one-joke movie about two top secret agents who happen to be best friends, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), and who also both happen to fall for her.

Since this is also an action-comedy movie, it opens with an action sequence where FDR and Tuck try to arrest an international terrorist Heinrich (Til Schweiger) but their mission gets so messy leaving much destruction, so they’re demoted and assigned to do desk jobs.

Reese is Lauren, a devoted career girl who can’t get over her past boyfriend. Her foul-mouthed best friend, Trish (Chelsea Handler), puts her profile on a dating website where she meets Tuck. They date and seem to like each other, but then she meets FDR in a video store. Their initial meeting is not cordial but soon, they’re also dating. FDR helps her make her ex-BF believe that he’s her current squeeze.

It doesn’t take very long for FDR and Tuck to know that they’re dating the same gal. She doesn’t know that they’re best friends and they make a pact to be good sports and may the best man win. But of course, it’s easier said than done. Soon, they’re stalking and sabotaging each other’s dates with Lauren. These scenes are supposed to be funny, but not too many people were laughing while watching them. One particularly scene is hardly credible: Reese dancing around her apartment while FDR and Tuck are planting surveillance cameras in various strategic positions inside.

It’s easy to guess that who’s going to get Reese in the end because one of the guys already has a family and he just returns to them in the end. One thing why the movie doesn’t work much is due to the fact that Reese doesn’t have much chemistry with either Chris or Tom. You’d even wonder why the two guys are fighting over her when Reese has lost her charisma and they even look better than her. Truth to tell, the movie has no gay overtones but Chris and Tom do have more chemistry with each other. No wonder that even after the romantic angle between one of them and Reese has been resolved, the movie ends with the them together in the final scene, not with Reese.