Review of War on Everyone (2016) by Philip O — 16 Oct 2016

-- WARNING! The Following is a long as balls review which could bore people to death or mildly titillate their funny bones. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED --.

Starring Alexander Skarsga?rd and Michael Pen?a as two corrupt cops in New Mexico, War on Everyone tells the story of Terry Malone and Bob Bolan?o and their debauched quest to frame and blackmail every criminal insight to further their own twisted agendas be that money and/or drugs. Writer and director John Michael McDonagh has already established and proven his worth in the industry with his previous black comedic work with the cult hit The Guard and the highly acclaimed Calvary. On paper, from the sound of the story and McDonagh's reputation as a creator, this should mean that the audience is in safe hands for a good ole mean spirited romp. Think again. Right off the bat, I found that there was barely ANY redeeming factors in John Michael McDonagh's tone deaf and.

Muddled War On Everyone.

What makes War on Everyone a war on all of my sensibilities as a fan of cinema is because of how strong, well rounded and entertaining John Michael McDonagh's previous films are. The Guard and Calvary are films that were critically well received and were featured in many top critics' favourite films of the year respective to their release. Which makes the dire quality of his latest feature a much harder pill to swallow. The plot itself is fairly cliche? with far too many unexplained coincidences garnished with a few quaint reveals here and there, but it is labored with pointless asides and jumps to scenes where characters exchange dialogue which.

Neither further advance plot nor character. These asides either consist of either jokes that fall flat on their face or quasi-.

Intellectual philosophical monologues, which feel like leftover tidbits from other older scripts. One in particular consists of Terry finding a jellyfish in the middle of the desert, which looks like the setting of Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias", and goes onto say how he's scared of being "accidentally" killed by a jellyfish. You could hear crickets chirp from 50 miles away.

Nevertheless, even when the narrative is chugging along the dialogue and discourse within the film feels flat and stale. The sticking out tongue, offensive and acerbic nature of their dialogue was as shocking as it was funny, which is to say it wasn't funny or shocking at all. Instead a high level of petulance exuded off the screen, which felt as welcome as pre- pubescent body odor. I though that this fault in the script may be in part due to the context of the film itself. Take John McDonagh's brothers 2008 masterpiece In Bruges. The reason why we are in both equal parts shocked and amused by the witty black dialogue Martin McDonagh pens in In Bruges is because we are not expecting to hear such vulgar language in.

The setting of a quaint European "fairytale town" full of tourists and families. A movie set in the United States of America on the other hand about two reprehensible corrupt cops? The history of countless police movies suggests we will hear some lewd lines and cursing. Thus the dialogue and jokes fall on death ears with not a soul laughing in their seats. What makes the dialogue worse is that you can also feel an air of smugness come across when you watch events unfold and banter arise from our "protagonists". You can feel that both Skarsga?rd and Pen?a believe that the lines they are spewing are just so funny and that they are just so funny for saying them.

Which brings us onto another issue with the film; the casting. You can tell Skarsga?rd is attempting to shed his pretty boy persona and trying very hard to craft a "character" within the hour and 38 minute runtime. Unfortunately there isn't enough meat on the bones of his thinly written role for him to try something wholly original and fresh. Michael Pen?a on the other hand is Michael Pen?a and shows as much range as a discounted spatula. Pen?a himself is no stranger to the buddy cop franchise and I find him to be a pleasant and warm presence in 2012's End of Watch. But where his character in that film is balanced and realistic, his role in War on Everyone feels like a cartouche of his End of Watch counterpart. The problem in common with both Skarsga?rd and Pen?a's characters however is not that they are necessarily bad in their respective roles; it's that McDonagh reaches a hand for us to sympathise and care for their characters when they deserve anything but. Scorsese masterfully shows in Wolf of Wall Street that you can make an entertaining motion picture showcasing the scum of the world that you can enjoy from a distance because it never once asks you for sympathy for it's characters. Having said that though the chemistry between the two leads is perfectly fine. It's like their two poorly performed peas in a pod. But the biggest crime in terms of casting that the film perpetrates is thinking that general public would buy Divergent's Theo James as a genuinely threatening villain. I've seen sponges more threatening.

Some pro's amidst the overwhelming cons are that at least the direction of the film is competent, chase scenes are entertaining and there is a brief random change of setting to Iceland which throws the audience completely off-guard and provides maybe the films most entertaining sequence. However I can't mask how surprised and truly disappointed I am at the way War on Everyone turned out. This is NOT the witty and clever subversion of tropes of the buddy cop genre that I had hoped for and expected from a.

Talent such as McDonagh. Instead this is an exploitative movie that thinks far too highly of itself to take a step back and take a good look at what it is; Offensive - and not in a good way.